Light My Way
by OnTheImportanceOfLungs
Summary: There are two types of shinobi in the world - the type of shinobi who could foolishly believe that there are two types of shinobi in the world and those who do not have that luxury. The flames of obsession, love, hatred and loss burn slowly in Konoha as this present incarnation of Team Seven discovers that there is more to being a ninja than flinging cool jutsu around.
1. Chapter 1

Edit: Holy hell, I have no idea what ffn did to my doc, but it totally just mashed the chapter together. It really didn't look that way in the file I had. These people. I should have noticed when the doc was 5000ish words instead of a bit shy of 7000.

Summary: Obsession. It pushes and pulls at you. Some of them are harmless. You start to lie to your friends and mentors. You do things for it. It's almost sentient. And you have a little more respect for other people's obsessions. Those three, they just won't quit, would they?

Author's Note: Because I like these. Like the original WotK, this is written completely on whim. My stories seem to be better received when I do that because they're more creative and shit and less philosophical. Expect lots of fun.

Pairings will fluctuate wildly. Very, very wildly. I think it's hyper unreasonable to assume that kids on the cusp of their teens (when we get to that point) won't experiment. Especially if they're kids that kill people. That's got to give people issues. What it'll end it, I'm not sure. If you disdain relationships which don't fit into your carefully defined pairing, you'd better stop reading, because I'm kind of interested in relationships between people who can't really fit together socially, whether it's between someone like Hinata and Naruto or between three members of team seven or even something exploitative like a teacher/student type deal.

Of course, there won't be much of that in the earlier chapters.

Light My Way  
Chapter 1  
Lungs

_Sometimes I feel like I don't know, sometimes I feel like checking out._

1

Naruto grinned. He was a bit underfed, a bit overly happy and not what someone would expect to be a good ninja when the boy grew up. The cycle, after, from genin to chunin to jonin was also a cycle of personality switches. The genin had to grow up and learn to hide their personalities to make it to the next level. In turn, as they eclipsed the need to protect their identities for safety's sake, they would revert back to what made them who they were rather than the mindless drones they were supposed to be. Most people decided that Naruto would never make it past being a chunin - he was a tad dumb and too loud to afford it.

But damn, he was good at pissing everyone off. It was around noon and the nightly ANBU patrols were hours away from starting. Most ninja weren't awake yet, sleeping off their nightmares and hangovers. The tenth of the shinobi population who had missions out of town had already left and the jonin sensei with their genin teams would only be coming back from their training sessions an hour or two before sunset - that was the optimal time to do their glorified chores in the summer. After all, it was character-building to train in the hot sun.

Therefore, Naruto knew he could get away with painting the Hokage monument orange. He liked the color - not as much as he claimed he did, but after a while, he decided he really did. Orange was so un-ninja. It'd so un-ninja that when he became the best. ninja. ever. everyone would shake their head and everyone would wear orange out of respect. They would paint the monument orange permanently or something.

He pull the string. The contraption which he'd set up - an unholy monster of sticks and string dangling precariously emptied nearly two hundred liters of orange painting he had stolen from a string of hardware stores over the monument. The monument was painted from sunshine yellow to just-shy-of-red, until the dripping paint mixed and marbled somewhat uniformly.

Naruto doused the contraption in kerosene he had also stolen - not from the hardware stores, but from Yakinaku BBQ, which had terrible management and terribly astounding profits, and lit the device he had painstakingly built up. He grinned again. Now, no one would know how he did it. He didn't stick around to watch the wood and plant fibers burn, choosing to leg it to his apartment on the other side of Konoha.

He made it out of the monument's park before he sank straight into the dirt.

"Amusing, Naruto-kun." It was Weasel.

Shit.

Weasel was really, really hard to get away from. He was super cool! He knew so many jutsu! But he really did sound rather amused and curious.

"If you let me out, I'll tell you how I did it." Weasel weighed the trouble he'd be in if he let Naruto loose against how much he wanted to know. The young ANBU member shook his head, almost reluctantly.

"I promise I'll go to the Old Man," Naruto said, looking resigned.

Weasel released the jutsu, expecting Naruto to pop out of the ground softly, but Naruto shot out of his earth jutsu like canon fire and landed on a nearby rooftop.

"Never said when, Uchiha-san!" Naruto shouted as he rolled off the rooftop into an alleyway.

Weasel, known to his family as Uchiha Itachi, cursed under his breath and coughed twice. "Not my problem," he whispered into his communicator, and decided to walk leisurely towards his clan district anyway. He wasn't on Uzumaki watch this week - if he were, he would have undoubtedly chased the boy for anywhere from several minutes to several hours.

But he just knew Naruto was headed in the direction of the divide between Dragon and Dog district, which had been built around the time of the Shodai. The houses and buildings had been done on-demand, and weren't planned. Thus, there were hundreds of little alleyways, even more abandoned buildings which led to other abandoned buildings, and a very large group of yakuza and petty thieves who thought they could challenge the reign of Shinobi.

Itachi, of course, could very easily handle himself, but there, Naruto had an upper hand. The young boy knew the more slummy districts very well - Horse district, which had been slowly approaching gentrification, but still had more racketeering than the rest of the village combined, Snake district, where everyone went for a night of fun and, if lucky, lost only their wallets, and Dragon-Dog, the worst of the lot. Naruto's apartment, of course, was a few scant blocks away from the Hokage's tower in the heart of Dragon district, but it the irony of the poorest district being right next to the heart of Konoha's power that led the young Uzumaki into his adventures.

Naruto swung from what he knew was a rather sturdy beam from the third floor of one apartment building to the second floor of another, landing on a previously prepared mattress.

"Hiroko-nee!" he shouted gleefully. A raspy voice answered him unintelligibly.

"Good morning, Hiroko-nee!" he bellowed.

"Brat!" she screamed. She coughed into the sleeve of her greying kimono. "This is an unreasonable hour."

"It's noon, the sun's up. And take a look at the Hokage monument!" he said, a little softer.

Hiroko drew herself up and wandered over to a small window with a fair amount of broken glass still in it.

"Naruto," she groaned, as she watched the rapidly drying paint. A large dollop was suspended under the Fourth's nose.

"Weasel-san nearly caught me, but I got away, because I'm a brilliant ninja!" he shouted over to her.

Hiroko shook her head. She had been a chunin at some point, but she had charred her lungs trying out a fire jutsu. There wasn't a very reliable retirement plan for chunin and the stipend wasn't quite enough to support her. Added to the fact that she spent most of her nest egg on sake and ineffective treatments for her lungs, she didn't have nearly enough to find an apartment. So she took advantage of her skills and decided to squat in an apartment that no one was sure anyone owned anymore. The rubble was impossible for anyone who wasn't a ninja to climb through on the first floor - even the ninja-folk would have to access it by jumping across a ten foot gap from the next apartment.

But that was abandoned too. Understandably, she was surprised when Naruto discovered her. She went from believing that the spirit of the Fourth was there to haunt her for being mediocre, to believing that the Kyuubi was trying to convert her into some sort of human slave, to believing that Konoha had no love for those who couldn't fight or take care of themselves. But she kind of knew that already.

She couldn't teach Naruto anything but chakra control exercises. Her specialty had been genjutsu and seduction - she knew nearly nothing about hand-to-hand fighting or the large, destructive techniques that she was convinced the boy would someday learn from the village's legends.

Naruto had no affinity for genjutsu at all. She supposed he could become one of the few male infiltration specialists, but she really didn't want to ruin his innocence like that.

Not that he was really too incident to begin with.

From their perch, she had seen his legs dangling off the side of the building as he watched slavers beat their battered 'products'.

The first time it had happened, he had literally jumped from the second floor building into some yakuza, snapping both his own legs and killing the man instantly. Of course, the seven year old boy who could evade even the Hokage's masked secret service would get away barely breaking a sweat. But the boy had learned that even he couldn't solve all the problems without giving her away or getting killed.

"One day, when I'm Hokage, someone's going to paint my monument orange. And it'll be awesome." His face became almost dark.

He practiced the Kawarimi no Jutsu with random objects in her apartment, disappearing all over the place.

"Wouldn't it be cool if I could do that poofing thing like the ANBU?" he wondered.

Naruto had never expressed any sort of sexual desire outside of cheeky imitation before. This was surprising. Hiroko gasped in disbelief, then she chuckled. Oh, of course.

"I'll teach you the Shunshin at some point, Naruto. You shouldn't be too young when learning it - it disrupts your chakra current and you'll have to work extra hard to maintain the little bit of control that I've taught you." Naruto shakily walked several steps up the wall of her 'building' and fell back down onto the rough wooden floor in response. He grit his teeth and tried again.

He wasn't saying anything anymore, which meant he would be at it for several hours at least. Hiroko shook her head and went back to sleep, but not before she heard Naruto mutter Shunshin under his breath several times.

2

"Where the hell were you yesterday?" Iruka shouted, exasperated with his charge. Naruto grinned and scratched the back of his head.

"Well, I had to help this old lady with her cat in the morning and was too tired to wait the two hours before school started, so I took a nap. Then my alarm clock rang, but I killed it by accident. The funeral ended at noon, but I was too sad to come to school."

The entire class stared at him, flabbergasted. If anyone else had said that, they would never, ever, have believed it. But this was Naruto. This sounded exactly like something he would do.

"So it wasn't you who painted the Hokage monument orange?" Iruka shouted, completely disbelieving.

"No," Naruto said, his tone sounding something like a snooty clan brat's. "I'd never disrespect the Hokages like that."

Iruka paused. That was true. Naruto did want to be the Hokage when he grew up - he made that very clear from the start. He waved the boy away.

"I know you did it," said Sasuke from in front of him. The boy didn't even turn around.

Sakura, to his right, looked up at Iruka, then back to Naruto. She was unsure.

Ino, to his left, turned to Naruto sharply, trying to gauge his reaction. Naruto looked a little unsure, but it could mean anything.

"My brother says he approves of you," Sasuke said, turning around this time. He looked as though he had swallowed a large chunk of lemon.

"That's because I'm awesome," Naruto said, his face entirely straight.

"Sasuke!" Iruka shouted. "Of all the people in the class to not pay attention…" he trailed off.

Sasuke turned around, but not before he muttered, "lunch," to Naruto.

Very few people had ever invited him to eat lunch with them. Naruto, in fact, could count the people who did on one hand. He smiled brightly and nodded at Sasuke's back, though he knew the boy couldn't see him. He didn't even notice Sakura glare at him.

"Naruto!" Iruka shouted, quite suddenly.

Naruto's head over the back of Sasuke's shoulder.

"Have you been listening?" Iruka shouted.

Oh no, he was going to be humiliated again. And then Sasuke would think he was too much of a loser to eat lunch with. Then Sakura-chan would never think he was cool and Ino would laugh at him. And if Ino laughed at him, Chouji and Shikamaru would think he was dumb and if they thought he was dumb, then everyone in a clan would follow their lead and-

"Pay attention!" Iruka shouted again. Naruto nodded quickly. "What was the First Hokage's bloodline limit?"

Naruto grinned. He looked at the board and realized today was the lesson on the leaders of Konoha. His grinned brightened.

"Don't know? Well you should have-"

"The First Hokage was known for his Mokuton techniques, the coolest bloodline ever, as the first person in history to have ever blended Suiton, the water jutsus and Doton, the earth jutsus. This allowed him a special type of control over plant life and stuff-"

Iruka groaned at his student's immature explanation.

"Some of the techniques he's known for are capable of things like building houses and entrapping enemies, but his most famous technique is the legendary Bliss-Bringing Hands, which was said to be able to stop the rampaging Bijuu with their ability to negate demonic chakra. Experts agree that other than the Fourth's Hiraishin, it was the coolest thing ever, but don't know anything about it. They theorize that he was capable of doing so because of his you-nicky view on the blend of Yin and Yang chakra. Jiraiya of the Sannin, who trained the Fourth, says that it might be because there are people in the world with instinctive control of Natural chakra, but he's the only one who can say that because he's the only expert on Sage Arts. His grand-daughter, another member of the Sannin, says that the Shodai had a you-nicky love of the everyday man which allowed him to defend them in the name of Konoha - she and Sandaime-jiji call this the Will of Fire. But it might be genetic as well, though no other Senju has expressed the Mokuton…" Naruto finished softly.

The entire class stared at him.

"It's pronounced 'unique', not you-nicky," Iruka corrected, though his head was spinning. "It means special."

"I know a lot about the Hokages," Naruto challenged.

More than I do, clearly, Iruka thought, still shell-shocked.

3

Sasuke sized the Uzumaki up. "You really do want to be Hokage," he finally said. If anything, he could see why Itachi said that Uzumaki was worthy of praise. The boy was stupid as hell. But if they were talking about things that Uzumaki liked to learn about, his genius was apparent.

They were sitting next to the fence on the academy's playground. He was eating his mother's onigiri and a whole tomato. Naruto had instant ramen in an extra-large foam cup.

"Believe it," Naruto confirmed. "I'm going to be the coolest Hokage ever. Even faster and stronger than the Fourth."

"How'd you learn about the Hokages?" Sasuke asked, reluctant to admit that there were things that he didn't know as well as other academy students.

"Oh, I asked the Old Man for scrolls about them."

"Old man?"

"The Sandaime."

Sasuke choked on his onigiri. "You're the Sandaime's student?" he wondered, a flash of jealousy visible on his face.

"No. He doesn't have time to take students. He eats ramen with me once in a while and gives me scrolls."

"Jutsu scrolls?" Sasuke asked, even more interested than he was early.

"No, nothing that cool. He says I have to wait for my jonin instructor to teach me cool jutsu. But he gives me lots of cool scrolls about experimental techniques. No actual hand-seals or anything, but the idea behind them and what other cool people think about them. That's how I knew about the Bliss Bringing Hands. I've learned about some of the Raikages and the Tsuchikages too, because they're Konoha's enemies."

Sasuke would have to ask his family about whether or not the Uzumaki were an important family who died off or something. He'd also ask the boy in front of him.

"Why you?" he wondered.

"Why me what?" Naruto responded between two slurps of ramen.

"Why does the Sandaime look after you?" Surely there were more orphans than just Naruto out there, right?

Naruto shrugged. "He said that my godfather couldn't, that's why."

"Who's your godfather?" Sasuke pressed.

"I don't know. He wouldn't tell me," Naruto said, a frown marring his features. This was abnormal to Sasuke. He'd never seen Naruto frown before - the closest expression was confusion or concentration.

Before Sasuke and Naruto could continue their conversation, Sakura worked up the courage to stalk over at last.

"I've been trying to eat lunch with you for two years, and you chose him?" she said to Sasuke with no small amount of accusation in her tone.

Sasuke glared, but said nothing.

"You've never asked," Naruto said. At least he'd never seen her ask.

"The boy's supposed to ask the girl," she sniffed. "He asked you," she said, suddenly rounding on him.

To be fair, Sasuke had never seen Sakura this hurt. Sure, when he ignored her, she'd just bother him more persistently, but she was never really… angry about it.

She sat down and started eating.

Naruto and Sasuke both stared at her.

"Keep talking!" she half-commanded.

"You weren't invited," Sasuke said, glaring harder. He knew instantly that he didn't mean to be that harsh. Sakura bit her lip and stood up, then walked away quietly.

Naruto threw him a furious glare and ran after her, leaving his ramen behind.

Sasuke made sure no one was looking and tried Naruto's ramen. It tasted really salty, but it was really tasty. And it was good with tomatoes. He supposed he'd eat lunch with Naruto again.

4

"Do it."

"No."

"Do it!" Naruto insisted.

Sasuke sighed as he walked over to Sakura. He was doing this for Naruto. So Naruto would tell him about cool things he didn't know about. So Naruto would show him the secret stuff that someone had taught him. He had shown him the Kawarimi already, and the two had practiced replacing themselves with random things. That was cool. That was more than Itachi had ever thought he was ready for.

"Sakura."

Sakura was eating lunch with a bunch of girls, some of which watched him from a distance, some of which pestered him constantly.

"Will you eat lunch with Naruto," he asked, "and me?" he finished at a much lower volume.

The girls looked scandalized. Sakura looked at them, then at Naruto. Then she looked at Sasuke and instantly stood up.

Naruto was a bit of a loser, but Sasuke was Sasuke, and hanging out with the boys was still a lot cooler than hanging out with other girls. That was why Ino ate lunch with Chouji and Shikamaru.

"Sasuke's showing me how to do some advanced academy katas and I'm teaching him the Henge no Jutsu," Naruto explained hurriedly to Sakura. "What can you show us?"

Sakura's face looked crestfallen. "I don't know how to do anything special."

Sasuke looked more crestfallen than her. "See, I told you she'd be useless," he grumbled to Naruto. Sakura heard him, and looked ready to tear up.

"Oh, I've got it!" Naruto shouted. He brought his voice down to a whisper. "She can let us copy her homework after class."

"What if we get caught?" Sasuke wondered, though he was already planning on changing answers and intentionally answering some things wrong. His father didn't care about his written exam grades much anyway.

"Nah, we'll be sneaky. We can do it on one of the training grounds, or in one of the parks in Rat district." Rat district was a five minute walk from the Academy.

Sasuke decided he'd explain his plan later. For now…

"Henge," Naruto said. A poof of smoke appeared and in his place stood a copy of Iruka-sensei. "You two are in a lot of trouble for planning to cheat," he shouted - not too loud though.

"Iruka-sensei," Sakura squeaked. She couldn't believe she had let Sasuke talk her into-

Iruka sensei giggled and then scratched his head in a very Naruto-esque manner. "See, this is really useful for tricking people," he said. Another cloud of smoke appeared and he turned back into Naruto.

"You nearly gave me a heart attack!" Sasuke grunted. If he had been kicked out of the Academy for cheating…

"Nah," Naruto said. "There's no punishment for cheating on written work. You just can't be caught."

Sakura stared.

"Jiji says that if you're caught, that means you'll be a bad ninja. But you don't really have to know some things to be a genin."

It made sense to Sasuke, though Sakura looked particularly uncomfortable.

"We're cheating right now. We're not supposed to learn jutsu or even use our chakra yet, but everyone in a clan knows how already."

Sakura looked upset again.

It hit Naruto.

"Let me show you how to find your chakra," he said, seemingly more excited at the prospect than even Sakura. "I'll show Sasuke the hand seals and let him try it out for now," he amended when Sasuke glared at him.

5

Naruto knew how to do a Bunshin no Jutsu, but he wasn't ever capable of successfully duplicating himself. It ate him, because Sakura and Sasuke had both gotten it on their first tries.

They learned not to ask where he was learning things from after he came back after an absence with a new technique.

It took a long time for him to make a Water Clone, and even longer to do it saying 'Bunshin no Jutsu'! instead of 'Tsuchi Bunshin no Jutsu!', but he got it.

Of course, he taught it Sakura and Sasuke, but he didn't expect his friends to sink to the ground in exhaustion after simply attempting it.

Sakura was better off. "It was eating my chakra. I could feel myself flow out and so I stopped."

They looked at Sasuke and paled. He was swaying and breathing heavily. His clone looked as though it was in a coma.

"Kill the clone!" Naruto said. "It gives you your chakra back when it dies."

He walked over to the comatose clone and held a blunt kunai to its neck.

"Kill it, Naruto," Sasuke said, looking ready to pass out. Worse, the clone seemed to be taking more and more of Sasuke's chakra.

"I-I can't kill it," Naruto said, his eyes wild. "I can't kill anyone anymore. Not someone who hasn't done anything wrong-"

"I'm going to die," Sasuke growled. He had fallen to his knees. He slowly pushed himself towards the clone and drew his kunai.

"Dispel it!" Naruto shouted, frantic.

"I don't know how to," Sasuke grunted.

Sakura pushed Naruto out of the way and closed her eyes, then stabbed the clone in the chest.

It dissolved into mud.

Sasuke stood up, already feeling a million times better as his headache receded.

Naruto was pointedly staring at a tree. Sakura was sobbing quietly.

"You've killed someone before," Sasuke decided.

"Shut up."

Naruto didn't look at him, but his face was stormy.

"Who did you kill."

"Drop it."

Sasuke did.

Sakura stared at the kunai she had stabbed 'Sasuke' with, its blade coated with the mud which the Earth Clone had been made out of.

"It's alright, Sakura. You didn't really stab me."

She didn't look too convinced.

After lunch, they all handed in applications for their graduation exam.

6

"This is highly irregular," Iruka protested. Technically, academy students were able to take the exam whenever. Sakura had dug the gem out of a rulebook that the Nidaime himself had written when he formed the Academy.

"But we're allowed to, Sensei," Sakura protested. Naruto and Sasuke were strangely silent for some reason. The former looked to be brooding and the latter looked sheepish. "We're going to pass."

Iruka exploded. "You guys haven't even learned how to access your chakra yet! If you can make a clone, I'll eat my hitai-ite!" he shouted, pulling his forehead protector off.

"Bunshin no jutsu!" the eight year old Sakura shouted. A pair of textbook clones appeared.

Iruka stared at his forehead protector.

"You don't have to eat that if you don't want to, sensei," she demurred. Sasuke chuckled. Naruto smiled briefly, then went back to brooding. It didn't look very natural on him.

"Fine," he said. "But the written exam's going to cover stuff that none of you have learned yet."

"Sensei," Sasuke spoke. "The lowest possible passing grade if we get over ninety percent on the practical is a twenty," he said flatly.

Iruka groaned. They had really done their reading.

"Even Naruto could pass with a twenty. And Sakura's going to do really well."

"Fine." Iruka unlocked a cabinet with a key in his desk and pulled out a trio of written exams. "Forty questions. Three hours. Knock yourself out."

He stalked out of the room and they immediately leafed through the exam as fast as they could.

"Okay, Naruto, do problems one to fifteen. That's stuff on Konoha history and chakra theory and you definitely can answer all of them. Sasuke, there's a lot of math problems in the middle and a bunch of questions on chemicals and poisons. I studied really hard for the upper year questions. We'll pass each other answers when we're nearly done," she spoke in a hurry. "I can't believe he left the room."

Naruto stared at his paper. His mood brightened.

1. Explain in three sentences or more how the Academy was established and why.

"Be brief, Naruto," Sasuke hissed, when he caught a glance at the questions.

Naruto almost pouted.

"And don't use words we don't understand, Sakura," he added as an afterthought. Sakura nodded.

Iruka peaked into the room every twenty minutes or so, but by and large, he was busy teaching class.

"I can't believe they thought we wouldn't cheat our asses off. Who do they think we are?" Naruto whispered almost triumphantly.

Sakura finished first. "Okay, here's the plan. You've both copied most of my answers. Sasuke can go do what he wants to edit the answers. Naruto, get most of the harder things wrong, then go crazy on the history section or whatever. No one's going to be able to help me throw a kunai better than I already do."

"I could henge as-"

"No."

7

Sasuke scored the best on the thrown weapons section of the test. It was almost written - he had the best aim and was a tad stronger than Naruto.

Naruto, who had opted to throw shuriken instead of kunai had scraped by, as had Sakura.

The most surprising bit of the test was definitely when Naruto tagged Iruka in the nose with his elbow entirely by accident and nearly broke it, earning himself a higher score than either Sakura or Sasuke.

By the time they were slated to take jutsu portion of the exam, a frantic Iruka who was sure of their passing had notified the Hokage. Somehow, during the process, a handful of the village's most celebrated jonin had figured out that a brace of genius genin. Iruka knew he should have known better than to say anything when Hatake Kakashi of the Thousand Jutsu was in the room.

"Sakura. Show me the Kawarimi no Jutsu," Iruka said. She instantly replaced herself with a table across the room.

He nodded.

"Bunshin."

A pair of clones appeared next to her in the smoke. The original nodded at him and they were dispelled with a hand signal.

"Now, uh… Henge into one of the jonin."

Sakura chose Sarutobi Asuma, the Hokage's son, complete with a cigar. She took a puff on it and gagged.

The Hokage sat up quickly, then realized that though the cigar had lit up as if she'd really taken a puff, there was no smoke issuing forth from her mouth - she was just pretending.

"Pass," Iruka said, almost reluctantly. "Tell Sasuke to get in here."

Sasuke pretty much did the same thing identically, but chose the senbon-chewing Shiranui Genma instead and spat on the ground. He passed.

Naruto walked into the room, fully aware of the fact that the Hokage was in there.

He chose to use the Kawarimi with the Hokage himself and grinned cheekily at the man.

"Henge."

He transformed into the Hokage. The 'Sandaime' smiled and tried to convince everyone that he was the real one, but no one believed him.

"Bunshin, now."

Naruto gulped. "Bunshin no Jutsu," he called out clearly.

"Dispel them."

The Bunshin jumped out the window, presumably to their deaths. Iruka chuckled.

"Pass."

"Wait." The man with silver hair and his hitai-ite over his eye had spoken up. "Do that again."

Busted.

The man took off his forehead protector and a red eye with three slowly spinning black tomoe stared Naruto down.

Shit. Sasuke had told Naruto that the Sharingan could see the motion and nature of chakra. He would have loved one himself - he could have learned so much from it.

"Bunshin no Jutsu," he sighed.

Two more Bunshin appeared.

"Naruto," the Hokage said, no trace of humor in his voice whatsoever, "who taught you how to do a Tsuchi Bunshin?"

Triple, four times busted.

"Sasuke," Naruto squeaked.

The Hokage shook his head. Naruto bit his lip.

"I watched-"

"Do not lie to me, Naruto," the Hokage said seriously.

"Hiroko-nee. She used to be a chunin. I met her in Dragon-Dog."

The Sandaime would be having word with his ANBU soon.

"A Konoha nin!" Naruto protested. "She got hurt and retired. She's twenty eight, and she likes sake, and hates tigers! She's good at Genjutsu, but I can't learn any."

The Sandaime looked between his elite jonin, but he didn't expect any of them to recognize them. Most of them were too young, too old, or had moved through the system too quickly to know an early-retired chunin.

"Take me to meet her."

Naruto shook his head. "She doesn't want anything to do with ninja anymore."

He instantly knew that was the wrong answer.

8

Naruto lead the Hokage and the troop of elite jonin through Dragon-Dog quietly, looking more angry than he usually did and into the abandoned apartment where he slowly ascended to the third floor.

"Hey, isn't this the building where your family used to live, Kurenai?" Asuma wondered. "Is Hiroko squatting in here?" he directed at Naruto.

The boy shook his head, which was somewhat confusing to everyone around him.

"So why are we in here?"

"You can't get into some buildings through the first floor," Naruto said.

They reached the third floor, which looked as though it had seen better days - a whole wall was gone and it was clear that the elements had gotten to the building. There were rotten planks and broken bricks all over the place.

"Only the old man comes with me," Naruto whispered, but everyone had heard him. "I swear, if you hurt her..." he whispered to the Sandaime.

"I am merely curious, Naruto." This was true. But if she posed a threat to the village…

Naruto grabbed the beam and swung.

The jonin gasped, but their fears were unjustified - Naruto had landed on a mattress in another building.

The Sandaime jumped after him and grabbed onto the ledge next to the mattress and flipped himself onto the mattress gracefully.

"That's a hell of a hiding spot," Asuma grunted at last.

The Sandaime and Naruto walked into the room, where Hiroko was lounging on her own mattress, reading some novel with an orange cover and giggling to herself.

"They found out," Naruto announced.

Hiroko saw the Hokage and let out a long groan.

"I'm sorry," Naruto said, looking ready to cry.

"Do not worry," the Sandaime said, though the look in his eyes made Hiroko very, very worried. "I am just here to figure out who Naruto has been keeping from me for so long."

"Hokage-sama," she said, standing up and bowing. "He discovered me when he was exploring Dragon-Dog two years ago. He wanted me to teach him about chakra, and I did."

The Sandaime looked at her for what felt like minutes, nodded, then handed Naruto a hitai-ite. "Congratulations for passing, Naruto. I suppose I will be taking you back to your new teammates."

He turned to Hiroko. "Report to my office sometime today or tomorrow."

He led Naruto back to the opening and grabbed Naruto by the waist, then jumped back until to where the jonin were waiting.

"I believe that this was no cause of concern."

"I told you," Naruto grumbled.

9

"Where do you think they've gone?" Sasuke asked Sakura, as they were left alone in the room.

"They're lecturing Naruto. They definitely found out," Sakura said.

"They have to let him pass. Even if they don't, we won't leave him behind," Sasuke declared.

"He wants to learn. He really, really wants to be Hokage. But more than that, he wants… he wants to be cool. Or powerful or strong, or something. But that makes it sound stupid. It's not like… it's not like how people usually wants things. It's… it's different. It's… more."

"No one can want it that much and not be successful."

"Do you want anything that much?"

"Do you?"

They shrugged and thought in silence uncomfortably.

After nearly thirty minutes, the Hokage and his elite jonin returned. Naruto had tied his hitai-ite around his neck. Sasuke grinned somewhat maniacally. He did, after all, have a habit of checking Naruto right over the chest with his forearm. Naruto saw his expression and unconsciously tapped on the forehead protector.

"We are now at an impasse. Usually, we have a selection of instructors and a list of students before we create our teams. In this case, I must confess to being incapable of properly selecting an instructor. None of you have been in the academy for long enough for a profile to be developed. It is clear that the three of you have either been actively hiding your abilities-"

At this, Naruto shook his head.

"Or we haven't been paying as much attention as we should have." By we, the Hokage clearly meant Iruka, whose face tinged pink.

The Hokage scanned his elite jonin.

"Oh no. No. No. No," Genma whispered, having figured out the Hokage's intentions, chewing on his senbon frantically. The others slowly began to pale.

"But since my normal jonin instructors have shown up with such interest, it is clear to me they have both the free time and the inclination to teach our new generation."

Hatake Kakashi had put his trademark book away and was now sporting an expression similar to that of a Nara deer in the way of a fire jutsu.

"But I don't think it would be a good idea to entrust you to them."

That crafty old man, he'd just wanted to make them sweat, Kakashi realized.

"Your teacher is going to be Uchiha Itachi."

At this, Sasuke's face split into a wide grin. After all, his brother was awesome.

"I will inform him of this tomorrow morning. You will meet him in room…" the Hokage said, looking expectantly at the only Academy teacher among them.

"I think room 322 is free," Iruka said quickly. He taught his class in 321 and the room across the hall never had anyone in it.

"322 it is," the Hokage said. "Get a good night's sleep and a hearty breakfast. You are now ninja of Konoha as Genin Team…" The Hokage struggled for some name or number.

"There are currently six genin teams," someone in the crowd pointed out.

"Team Seven."

Naruto, Sakura and Sasuke looked amongst one another.

Team Seven.

They liked it.

10

They celebrated their victory by going to Sakura's favorite sushi place, several blocks away from the Uchiha district.

"This is a huge honor, by the way," Naruto said. "They put us on genin teams."

Sasuke frowned. Everyone in his family had been on genin teams.

"So around ninety to a hundred ninja graduate from the academy at any given point. There are five classes our age - so many people that our lunch periods have to be scheduled for different times. Maybe fifty or sixty people fail the graduation exam we just took and are held back. But then, everyone's assigned to a team with one of the forty elite jonin," Naruto explained.

"But the jonin can't all watch over genin, right?" Sasuke asked rhetorically. "Some of them work in teams themselves, to do A rank and S rank missions, where bringing genin along would be suicide."

"Yup. So only around a maximum of the thirty brightest and best who also show possibility of carrying the old man's Will of Fire are hand picked by their jonin sensei."

"But we didn't even have to take that test," Sakura spoke up after swallowing one of her rather large cuts of raw salmon. Sashimi, especially fish which only swam in the ocean, was expensive, but Sasuke was in a celebratory mood. And Sasuke was really, really rich. The boy was polishing a large amount of tuna himself. Naruto had opted to go with some of both and seemed to be enjoying it, even.

"Nope! Which means we're well on our way to being cool." He smiled widely. The setting sun cast an orange glow on Naruto. He looked almost like the Fourth atop the Boss Toad Gamabunta's back, riding off to meet his doom against the Nine-Tailed Fox.

Sasuke scoffed, then waved a waiter over. He fished several thousand-ryo notes out of his wallet and left a generous tip.

They walked out of the restaurant with the weight of expectations hanging over them.

"We did it," Naruto said softly. "We did it. There's no way we could have done it alone, so we worked together."

Sakura knew he was having some fantasies of the Sannin.

"Where should we go now?" Naruto asked, secretly hoping his teammates would spend the rest of the day with him.

"Our parents would probably want to hear about this, but it can wait. It was a surprise anyway." They grinned and headed over the park in Rat district where they copied homework off of Sakura for so long.

Naruto smiled.


	2. Chapter 2

Author's Note: Poor Itachi. He has _no_ idea what he's gotten himself into.

Also, shit hits the fan. Really. Really. Fast.

Light My Way

Chapter 2

Lungs

_The more you see, the less you know._

1

Naruto woke up bright and early the next morning and made sure his teeth were brushed. It wouldn't do to make a bad impression with his new sensei.

He wandered out of his apartment and watched the sun rise as he approached the gates of the Academy. There were some students there already, most the children of shinobi who had early obligations. The wind was gentle that morning, so most of the children were practicing with shuriken and senbon needles rather than their kunai.

"Naruto!" someone shouted. It was Inuzuka Kiba, who used to play with Naruto sometimes during lunch. "Where did you steal a hitai-ite from?"

Naruto smiled, wide and with a hint of challenge. "I passed yesterday. I'm a genin now. On a _team_. With Sakura-chan and Sasuke!"

True to his word, Sasuke's pretty mom had dropped him off at the gate before disappearing in a shunshin. Her own forehead protector had been visible and there was a wazikashi strapped to her belt. She must have had a mission.

"Sasuke!" Naruto called. "Where's Sakura?" he asked, in an attempt to make conversation.

Sasuke shrugged. "She won't be late, but we're really early I think. You have to listen to everything Itachi says," he said, changing gears at a blinding speed in the way only children could.

They sat around talking with the arrivals from their class, whose reaction ranged from "I wonder if Iruka-sensei would let me take the test" to "I can't believe you two are joking about something this serious."

Sakura finally arrived several minutes before they were due to meet Itachi, out of breath and with red stains on her shirt.

When she realized that Naruto and Sasuke were both staring, she looked down and blushed, then began wiping them away frantically. "Mom's spaghetti," she explained. "I was so nervous I threw up a little."

Naruto scrunched up his face, but Sasuke had only sympathy. He, too, was extremely nervous - he kept wiping his palms against his pants and he wanted to sit down. Naruto seemed to be the only one who wasn't affected by the monumental event before them.

When they arrived in the room, Itachi was already waiting for them.

"Weasel-san!" Naruto shouted, his face splitting into a huge grin. Itachi groaned.

"I'm not part of ANBU anymore, Naruto-kun." Itachi turned to the other two. "Outoto. Sakura-san."

"Sakura-san?"

She had been looking between her new jonin-sensei and Sasuke, over and over again, her face getting progressively redder.

"S-sensei!" she snapped to attention.

Itachi groaned. This was the team from hell.

2

It had been four days since Itachi had gotten his team, and he wasn't sure who he hated more, the Hokage or himself for being suckered into teaching his little brother, Uzumaki Naruto and an eight year girl with a crush on him.

They had been completing a D-rank mission a day after the Hokage had tipped him off about Naruto's financial situation. It hadn't been difficult to paint a fence, or let Naruto haggle over the price of vegetables in Horse district (the boy was _far_ too good at that). It was a little tougher trying to catch a stray cat, as animals seemed to hate Naruto with a passion.

The worst mission, by far, was moving the contents of a supply depot from one side of town to another. At this point, the novelty of receiving money for missions had worn off and Itachi's team had started to make careless mistakes in labeling things. Sasuke had a particularly bad habit of going on 'bathroom breaks' which lasted twenty minutes or so.

"When are we going to go on some _cool_ missions?" Naruto complained.

Itachi never remembered having complaints of this sort when he was younger.

"How about we start doing some C-ranks next week?" Sasuke suggested.

Even Sakura looked a bit hopeful at that.

Itachi sighed. "Okay. All of you are dismissed. Have the mission report ready by tomorrow."

His three genin disappeared off to parts unknown, and Itachi was left wondering when Naruto and Sakura had replaced him when it came to free time.

3

The genin members of Team Seven were currently discussing how performing a shunshin might be possible in their favorite park.

"Well, basically, you're putting yourself through space really quickly. It's not air or anything like that, because it's not a wind jutsu. So it has to be more based in moving yourself rather than letting the wind move your or something like that, right?"

Naruto stared at Sasuke, in deep thought. "The seal is just ram, so it forces an instant release of chakra. This is supposed to be a D-rank technique!"

"And everyone can do it," Sasuke said gloomily. "Just not us."

"Why don't you just ask-"

"No!" both of them said.

"I want to learn this by myself," Naruto said. His fingers cycled between the handseals. "There has to be some sort of packaging. No technique that does more than just one exact thing will use just _one_ hand seal, no matter how people learn it."

"Iruka-sensei calls this reinventing the kunai," Sakura grumbled, but her fingers flashed through the twelve generic hand seals as well. She fed her chakra to each one experimentally.

"Snake!" Sasuke called out. "Definitely snake. We use snake seals to speed up our fire techniques, and in the kawarimi to determine locations."

"But if it were just snake, it'd go everywhere. Something has to stabilize it," Sakura said. "Horse? Boar? Boar has more direction, but it slows it down again."

Naruto twisted his hands into Ram-Horse-Ram in quick succession and willed his body to move. He tripped, hitting his head on the ground.

Sasuke chortled, then tried it himself. He, too, landed on his face.

"We've made a self-tripping jutsu, then. This is good. It's a fall in the right direction." Sakura struggled to not burst into laughter and failed.

They experimented with the boar seal, then Naruto started throwing out random seals into the mix, and ended up charring a tree, knocking himself out twice and blowing up a park bench, the last of which he wasn't able to replicate.

"How about we just ask Itachi-sensei tomorrow?" Sakura grumbled. Even Sasuke, who was extremely determined to discover the shunshin without help, nodded at this.

But when they left the park, Naruto begged off, claiming that he wanted to enjoy the weather a little more.

All three of them knew what he'd be doing for the rest of the day.

4

"That's not the Shunshin. That's a thousand, million times cooler," Sasuke declared.

Naruto formed a string of eight handseals from ten feet away, then _exploded._ Aside from vaporizing everything in a two feet radius, he had left a Naruto shaped hole in a large oak tree, appearing completely unharmed on the other side.

Unfortunately for Naruto, Itachi-sensei had appeared right behind him in his own Shunshin and knocked him unconscious with the back of his tanto.

"What's the big idea, sensei?" Sakura shouted, horrified.

Naruto came to his senses groggily.

"Never. Ever. Do. That. Again." Itachi's tone of voice had become deadly, his Sharingan was spinning wildly and he looked more frazzled than Sasuke had ever seen him.

Sasuke stared at his older brother blankly. "Why not? That was…" Sasuke struggled for the adjectives which Naruto used, before settling on, "awesome."

"He converted half of chakra and _all_ of the mass that surrounded him into an explosion and used the energy to propel himself at speeds which my _eyes_ couldn't pick up."

All three of his students looked at him blankly.

"Yeah!" Naruto said. "That's why the last three seals are there. To form a chakra shield. I nearly killed myself yesterday."

Itachi looked at Naruto weakly. "How about I teach you how to use the Shunshin and you do that from now on, instead?"

5

The missions desk was cluttered that fateful morning. Gekko Hayate, a newly minted Tobeketsu Jonin was manning the desk due to a cold he had just developed from an excursion to Snow Country and was coughing a ton.

"Genin Team Seven, first C-rank?" he asked. He coughed lightly into his hand twice.

"Yes, Team Seven, consisting of Jonin Sensei Uchiha Itachi, Genin Haruno Sakura, Genin Uchiha Sasuke and Genin Uzumaki Naruto. Requesting surveillance or reconnaissance." A discreet handseal from Itachi started bartering with Hayate.

"Mission assignment in Zero-zero-fifteen. Await orders, line position four." They continued to barter.

The three genin members of team seven looked to one another.

"Some ninja hate some missions, but technically we're not allowed to choose which missions we're allowed on. You see that handsign that Itachi-sensei keeps using? It means less death. I think he doesn't want us to go on a mission that could possibly end with us killing anyone."

Sasuke and Sakura looked at Naruto with no small measure of curiosity.

"How do you know this?" Sasuke asked.

"I've been in here a lot. Jiji's son, the man with the beard and smells like smoke, he explained it to me once, but then Jiji yelled at him."

"Do you think they're bribing each other?" Sakura wondered aloud. A team which was clearly several years older than them sneered at them. She glared back.

"Please forgive my students, Itachi-san. They are not used to seeing distinguished members of our younger generations."

"There's no harm done, Uroko-san."

The woman briefly smiled at the three of them before briefly informing her students crossly that they'd be doing D-ranks for the next week due to bad behavior.

"Line Positions One, Two and Three, your mission scrolls are ready."

The woman and several other jonin-sensei took the mission scrolls with their students and left, leaving Itachi, his team and Hayate alone in the room.

"They're going to have to be blooded at some point, Itachi. You know how the Council is about this sort of thing."

Hayate wasn't a very celebrated member of the Leaf Shinobi forces, but everyone knew that his crowd was the sum total of the stars in his generation.

"Gai says that he and Kakashi were having lunch with Ino-Shika-Cho, and they talked about how Mitokado-sama was pushing the Hokage to teach your team assassination techniques."

"We don't have good precedence for any successful resistance to that."

"Aye. We run this village because we preserve our young one's innocence. This doesn't sit well with me. _Your_ case doesn't sit well with me."

For a moment, Sasuke saw a type of strain in his brother's eyes that he'd never seen before.

"You know about Special Order Nine-Four-Three?"

"Yeah. I was part of it. God damn we nailed those Kiri bastards, but I didn't anticipate anything like _that_ happening. To the Roots of our Great Tree, the fire may burn down the world if nary a spark touches our leaves."

"That kind of talk is dangerous."

"They can't touch me. I grew up with one of the Three Great Generations. I'll stick my neck out for Asuma no matter how much I hate him, and Kakashi would die for me as much as he wants to be in Yuugao's panties."

"That must be nice," Itachi said, his voice carrying an undertone of wistfulness. "Now, may I have my mission assignment before my genius genin have a chance of figuring out what we've been talking about?"

Hayate nodded and handed Itachi the mission scroll.

Itachi made to walk out of the missions room, but he turned around quickly. "Watch out for Kurama Uroko. She's Danzo's, through and through." His Sharingan flashed red as he checked Hayate for any Genjutsu but, as he expected, none were found.

6

Konoha, the Village Hidden in the Leaves, was considered the largest Hidden Village amongst the Great Villages of the Elemental Nations.

Each district boasted between ten thousand and twenty thousand inhabitants and the areas between districts held as many, for an astonishing total of nearly two hundred thousand inhabitants. Truly, they were the least hidden of the villages, with the shinobi population being less than a single percentage of the population. The next largest village was Iwa, with a tenth the population and roughly the same amount of shinobi.

Yet Konoha was considered the most successful, despite the fact that the village was hidden in name only. Most maps in this day and age published Konoha as a city in Fire Country. It was, comparatively, truly difficult to find Suna.

Konoha was dwarfed in size easily by the capital of Fire Country, Yeddo. The absolutely gigantic city was situated against the ocean and nearly twenty five times the size of Konoha. And three _million_ people.

_Yet_, Sasuke marveled, _they still had no control over Konoha_.

While villages like Suna were dependent on their daimyo when it came to things like funding, the Shodai Hokage had made it so that Konoha could declare itself independent at no cost whatsoever.

If push came to shove, all the land within village limits, all the training fields and, if terraced properly, the mountainside could all be farmed. It wasn't a myth that every Konoha jonin had killed a hundred ninja and if push came to shove, Sasuke was damned sure that every Konoha jonin could kill a hundred thousand civilian.

It felt good to be powerful.

Civilians were just so _helpless_ - he could break necks for hours without feeling any sort of tiredness, breath fire and he was _eight years old_.

"Your expression is scaring me, Sasuke," Sakura said meekly.

She looked every inch the scared eight year old girl. All four of them were dressed in civilian garb, with literally nothing to give them away.

Naruto's hair had been tamed, his own was cut down to an inch despite his displeasure, and Sakura had dyed her hair blonde.

"Okay. So, we're from Lightning Country. I'm Higa Naruto and she's Higa Sakura. You two are our cousins, Oshiro Itachi and Oshiro Sasuke. Our parents are traveling merchants who went to do business in Suna. We're on vacation in Yeddo with our cousins and their parents. If there's anyone who can be suckered into investigating, we'll probably end up killing them anyway…" Naruto trailed off.

"It's okay, no one's going to care too much. The city's far too large," Itachi said, with no small amount of trepidation. "As ridiculous as it is to send kids, we're investigating some multinational corporation-"

"Correction," Itachi said, stopping for a moment. "_I_ am investigating a large multinational corporation. The three of you are what we call my cover. That means you act like how you're supposed to act so I can do what I want. Have you studied your dossiers to satisfaction?"

Naruto nodded. Itachi quizzed him three or four times, then was satisfied. "You never want to know your cover _too_ well - then it starts sounding mechanical. These guys are civilian, but they're good at this sort of thing."

"I can't believe we're going to be taking Gato Corporation-"

"Sakura. We are _not_ taking a corporation down. We are investigating. If the Hokage needed to take a corporation down, he would send me with Sharingan no Kakashi and my mother."

Sasuke looked at him confused. "Mom kills people?"

Itachi gave a rather mirthless chuckle.

7

As they approached the capital, the farms became spaced closer and closer until there weren't farms but very large houses several hundred paces from one another. Soon, the houses became more cramped and the tall buildings became visible in the distance. Somehow, Itachi had picked up an unevenly shaped plank of wood with wheels on them and was now rolling along.

His personality had totally changed as well - he was wearing skin tight jeans which made Sakura blush, all black - stylistically and not out of necessity, and he was _flashing smiles at girls_. Sasuke thought he was going to have a heart attack.

Sasuke, too had changed his personality the best he could - he became surly and withdrawn, like an introverted mirror of his brother. Naruto had turned his loudness up to eleven and Sakura screeched like a harpy, reacting loudly with Naruto. All three of them complained (in jest in Sasuke and Sakura's case and in truth in Naruto's) about the long walk loudly.

Itachi stopped several times to talk with girls and with two _boys_.

Sasuke was beginning to think that his brother had been trained to do this.

They had ditched all their weapons and scrolls back in Konoha. Sasuke felt rather naked without kunai and shuriken.

"Damn it," Naruto whispered, "if I had _one _senbon."

Naruto didn't even use senbon.

"How do you feel _safe_ without a weapon?" Naruto whispered to Itachi.

"Naruto," Itachi said, out of the corner of his mouth. "You can walk on walls, teleport and _explode_. If push comes to shove, we can run for _hours_, Sasuke can breathe fire and Sakura can collapse a civilian sternum in one well placed elbow." He didn't need to elaborate on what _he_ was capable of.

Naruto seemed much happier after that.

They checked into a dingy motel a mile from the daimyo's inner city and Naruto instantly felt at home. The streets were narrow, allowing ninja to run through them much quicker than civilians. There were even ladies of the night on the corners.

After the bored receptionist gave them a pair of rusty keys, Itachi left them alone in the room to meet a deep cover chunin on the other side of the city.

"This is a good opportunity to practice attention-diverting genjutsu, Sakura," Itachi said, pulling a tiny scroll out of his… crotch area?

Sasuke and Naruto gaped.

Itachi unsealed the scroll, which became an even larger scroll, unsealed that and let a trio of kunai, a packet of senbon and two other scrolls tumble onto one of the two ratty mattresses.

"As for you two, Sasuke, practice the more advanced sleeper chokes from the Interceptor Fist on Naruto. Naruto, practice your calligraphy. I'll teach you low level Sealing. If any of you make _any_ noise at all…"

Itachi jumped onto what he called his 'skateboard' and glided out of the door which Sakura threw open, then slammed shut.

"Who knew Itachi could be anything other than Itachi-sensei?" Sakura asked.

"I've never seen my brother like this," Sasuke said. "It's kind of scary. He could have been any civilian teenager if we didn't recognize him."

Sakura got to work, copying over the extremely useful genjutsu on a notepad with a pencil that the motel had provided and supplementing the texts with her own theories on the way the chakra worked.

Naruto had unsealed the other scroll and was gaping at the huge amount of calligraphy equipment presented. Once in a while, Sasuke, who quietly practiced his katas while standing on a bed, attempted to put on of the others in a sleeper hold.

He managed to get Naruto twice, before Naruto learned to completely difficult brushstrokes without too much concentration.

"Your handwriting is _still_ really bad," Sakura admonished, staring over to the desk from the bed where she was working. Sasuke still hadn't managed to nail her.

After several hours of hard work, she quietly attempted the genjutsu.

Sasuke realized something was wrong when he tried to place a sleeper hold on… who was he trying to get this time? He looked at Naruto.

There had been two people in the room earlier, he was sure of it.

"Naruto." Naruto snapped his attention to Sasuke.

"Where's Sakura?" Naruto and Sasuke asked at the same time.

"Uh… I think she was… what was she doing?"

Sakura materialized behind Sasuke, pining his arms with her knees against the bed and with her inner forearm against his neck. "Got you!" she cried triumphantly.

Naruto jumped, knocking his chair back.

"I am going to kill _all_ three of you," Itachi groaned, still in his other persona.

Sakura squeaked, pulling her elbow back and actually choking Sasuke, who coughed violently. Naruto managed to keep himself from screaming.

Itachi closed the door soundlessly. "The good news - no alarms have been triggered, despite the fact that Gato all but owns this district. The bad news - Masashiro-san says that there's tons of evidence that Gato is cheating on his taxes somehow, and no one knows how. I'm going to have to discover how before we leave. And that means I can't torture it out of anyone, or kill anyone."

"And the really bad news?" Sasuke pressed.

"Thirty minutes after I met Masashiro-san, I was supposed to meet him in his apartment, but he never showed up. I liberally used the Shunshin and genjutsu to get back here."

"So our cover's blown?" Sakura asked.

"Damn it!" Naruto groused. He had spent hours reading that dossier.

Itachi shook his head, then resealed all of the calligraphy material and Sakura's scroll, then returned it to his pants.

"I'm going to have to stage my own death. The three of you are going to have to go hungry for several days, then escape with one another into the slums. I'm going to go back to Konoha. In four month's time, another jonin will show up at a location we'll designate now. This is what we call 'going native'."

His genin gaped at him.

"There is thirty two _billion_ ryo on the line, enough so that the Hokage can pressure the daimyo to agreeing to _everything_ he asks for with this money. Think of it like this - around twenty five _million_ D-rank missions. Naruto. You are team leader. You have… experience in these matters."

Naruto nodded firmly.

"Suiton: Awa." Itachi's hands flickered and sent out a stream of bubbles, washing the dye out of Sakura's hair.

"In the next two hours or so, you _must_ master the Fade-Into-Nothing, Sakura. You can hold a maximum of two people with that technique, and we'll have to escape through the window."

"I'll do it in fifteen minutes, Itachi-sensei." There wasn't a hint of arrogance in her words. Sakura got to work, cycling between the handseals.

"A little more chakra to the tiger seal, I think," she mumbled to herself. Itachi was glad he was working with someone who had scored even higher than he had on the Intelligence Quotation exam.

"Okay, trying it," she confirmed.

"Take Sasuke. Naruto has _far_ more chakra than he does - it'll be a lot harder," Itachi whispered. "When I'm gone, you three _need_ to train. Nothing difficult. Brush up on your Taijutsu - I'm sure that Naruto can find some cul-de-sac. Chakra control for Naruto, chakra-growth exercises for Sakura. You all know the big three - leaf control can be done with any small, light object, tree-walking can be done on any wall, water walking can be done with any spilled bucket of water," he started speaking in a rapid fire staccato.

"I'm going to set explosive charges here now - this explosion's going to be _huge_. Konoha would never blow up anything in its own cities or towns: that's what most people think, no one knows what type of thing the Hokage can or will order. They're going to think that we were from some other hidden village or that I was a missing-nin who's exploited children along with genjutsu and was eliminated after getting caught. Civilians don't think things through - this entire floor is going to go up-"

"There are _other people_ living-"

"Do you have _any_ idea how many lives thirty two _billion_ ryo will save?" Itachi hissed at Naruto. "This is the hard, cold choice that we ninja _must_ learn to make, and damn it I thought this mission would _not_ be the one you children learned it on."

Itachi made a strange hand seal, then pressed his fingers to Sakura's head, then to Naruto's, then to Sasuke's. "In some ditch all-alone, I may die tonight, killed for my country where there isn't light… in your minds, may there be a funeral pyre, in your hearts, may you remember... I carried the Will of Fire."

Itachi and Sakura performed the Fade-to-Nothing and suddenly Naruto and Sasuke basked in a feeling of invisibility, before they all leapt out an open window.

They skidded along the side of the motel, then dashed into an alleyway.

"Katsu."

The world turned yellow and white as the entire motel lit up.

"Good night, travel well," Itachi's voice ghosted and Sakura felt his chakra signature fade.

"That building, two hundred paces north, along the wall - it's abandoned, there's a small hole in the brick, squeeze into it," Naruto whispered into each of the other two genin's ears, and they made a mad dash during the confusion.

No one saw hide or hair of them.


	3. Chapter 3

Author's Note: Sorry these are getting a little shorter, guys. It's becoming a little harder to write. But I still wanted to maintain a day-or-three kind of update speed.

Light My Way

Chapter 3

_I want to reach out and touch the flame._

1

Itachi did not believe that he had ever seen the Hokage so angry before.

"You left our three most promising genin, possibly in the history of Konoha, in Yeddo. Over the belief that you could net Konoha the sum of Gato Corporation's company value."

"An estimated net worth of thirty two billion ryo, as well as the end of various trades which are inherently damaging to the nature of Fire Country on a whole."

"Elite Jonin Uchiha Itachi. You left. Our _three_. Most. promising genin, possibly in the _history_ of Konoha. In the city of _Yeddo_. Over the _mere_ belief that you could net Konoha a little bit of _cash_."

"An extraction would not be a problem - I can leave today, Hokage-sama, and make it right. I can-"

The Hokage grunted, breaking out into a nearly manic grin. "Oh, no, I don't think so. The only time _anyone_ can find Naruto when he doesn't want to be found is when someone looks for him with the All Seeing Crystal of the Senju clan, which can _only_ be operated by the Hokage. At the age of _five_, Naruto hid for forty eight hours from a Hyuuga jonin and _three_ Inuzuka trackers."

The Hokage slammed his hand onto the desk, nearly splitting it in half.

"You gave him and a team of genius genin the ability to use Shunshin no Jutsu, a stealth Genjutsu and told them to go _native_ for four months, and to meet an _unspecified_ jonin on the street where you _blew up a _building!" the Hokage ended with a roar.

Itachi bit his lip.

"It surely isn't as if you've ever been placed on Uzumaki watch, is it? _None_ of the genin are combat tested, or blooded. When they see the slave trade, what the _hell_ do you think they're going to do, Elite Jonin?"

Itachi's lip had begun bleeding.

"They will break cover, putting themselves in positions to be captured and _killed_, and take it upon themselves to rescue those who they believe are suffering under Gato's aegis."

Itachi licked his lips.

"And then Gato will hire shinobi. Shinobi which they will _engage_."

This was not looking good.

"And what will happen when someone deals Naruto a killing blow?"

Itachi looked perplexed.

"Are you _dumb_, boy?" the Hokage shouted.

Itachi continued to look perplexed.

"The Kyuubi will come out!" the Hokage roared.

"_What?_"

The Hokage deflated for a moment, then shook his head in disbelief. "You weren't told?" His voice had dropped to a whisper. "Oh, but it _wouldn't_ be in the file, would it?"

"Told that… the Kyuubi will come out of Naruto's dead-" Itachi looked appropriately horrified. "He's a demon container?" Itachi wondered, his eyes bulging in a show of more emotion than the Hokage had ever seen out him. "I just assumed that he was the Fourth's-"

"Dismissed," the Hokage spat. "Do _not_ repeat anything we've discussed in this room to _anyone_."

Itachi left the room, his face a mask of horror. The Hokage made a trio of handsigns.

"Uchiha Mikoto and Hatake Kakashi."

The pair of ANBU standing behind his desk disappeared to fetch the Hokage his jonin.

"I'm too old. Far too old," the Hokage muttered, looking skyward. "If only I had learned the damn seal instead of you, dear Minato…"

2

"I guess… I guess I'm going to brief you two or something?" Naruto said. They had been hiding in their hole for nearly a day. Sasuke's stomach was growling and the hole had begun to smell like urine.

"We're all well rested, if a little hungry. We need to find a more permanent hide-out. This is too out in the open."

Sakura looked around. If this was "out in the open", she really wasn't sure what a hide-out would be.

"It's out in the open because you can access it from the alleyway easily," Naruto explained. "A good place to hide is one in which you have to do something special to get to, or a place that's hidden in plain sight. Since we're pretty much new here, we can't just find places like that - we have to use our ninja training to get places that civilians can't get to."

Naruto looked around, then flipped himself out of the hole. "Out, there's no one around," he said quietly. Sasuke and Sakura followed.

"Okay, lesson one. All the television shows and movies make it look easy to steal from fat merchants and stuff. That's not true because they expect it. If you're fat and you have a business in a shitty district, that means you know what you're doing. Try to find people who are dressed nicely. They have money and if they're wandering around here, they believe they're too important to be pickpocketed. Split, meet back here in fifteen minutes."

Naruto dashed up the alley in a surprising show of speed, hitting a rather crowded side street with a ton of merchants and vendors hawking their wares.

"I'll use my Genjutsu," Sakura decided.

Sasuke had something different in mind. He had seen the looks that people had given Itachi, even in the village.

He wandered slowly out into the same crowded street as Sakura simply disappeared from his senses and then purposefully bumped into a woman, falling on his hands.

"N-nee-san?" he whispered, tears in his eyes. _Good, the dirt was disguising his calluses._ "Why did you push me?"

The woman, who looked to be thirty or so, looked mortified. Sasuke pouted, then stomped down the alleyway. She seemed to have some sense, as she checked for her wallet in the corner of his eye, but when she realized that she still had it, she ran after him and tapped him on the shoulder.

"I'm so sorry!" she cried out.

Sasuke burst into tears. "No, it's fine. It's just that… No, I wouldn't want to trouble you. D-don't follow me, nee-san," he whispered, then continued to walk.

"No, no, what's wrong…"

"S-sasuke," he said. "I'm Sasuke. My nii-san, he's gone. Bad men took him away two days ago. I was just trying to find him."

She reached out to pat him on the back in an awkward hug and he shrank into himself. "When's the last time you've eaten?" she asked, dreading the answer.

"When nii-san gave me a meat bun," Sasuke said. "I'm really sorry to trouble you," he said again, then made to walk away, but the woman held him close.

"There, there. How about I buy you something to eat as an apology for knocking you over?" the woman asked.

Sasuke looked at her hopefully. "Would you really?"

The woman nodded.

"Thank you!" Sasuke cried, burying his face into her bosom.

If it worked on his mother, a fierce jonin of Konoha. Civilian women didn't stand a chance.

3

They met thirty minutes later than they planned. Naruto was the first one to arrive, but he didn't worry. Sasuke and Sakura could both take care of themselves.

"I made three thousand ryo. Pickpocketing," Sakura clarified. "It was too easy. Civilians are really susceptible to Genjutsu."

Naruto showed her a ten thousand ryo note and she frowned.

"I'll be more bold next time." Then she grinned.

Sasuke had shown up, looking well fed.

"How was being helpless, Sasuke? I saw you with that woman," she said, her grin widening.

"Too easy," he said, a smirk apparent. "She took me to a nice restaurant and then gave me a thousand ryo to buy food with later."

"Okay, so we have fourteen thousand ryo between us-"

"This is even better than doing D-ranks," grumbled Sasuke. "The food's better and we're paid twice as much."

Sakura giggled, but Naruto didn't look too amused.

"It's different at night," he said, sounding a bit more ominous than he looked. "Dragon-Dog's kind of like this during the day."

Sasuke indulged in a pair of fresh tomatoes for one hundred ryo and Naruto bought a carton of ramen for another eight hundred and fifty. ("The water's free and you can boil it without any work at all", he'd said, but Sasuke thought he just wanted to eat an unhealthy amount of ramen.) Sakura had almost clipped on a cheap little butterfly for her hair, but the look in Naruto's eyes stopped her from attaching it. He shook his head frantically.

"That means your body's for sale," he had said grimly.

Sakura's fingers bent it out of shape.

They wandered into an abandoned apartment building through a broken window, which Sasuke complained about.

"Look, if the window's broken and still has shards in it, it means that no one's claimed the building yet."

Sasuke shut his mouth. Sakura looked at the destroyed butterfly clip and the broken window meaningfully. Neither of them were sure what type of childhood Naruto had lived, but even at eight, they knew that it probably wasn't very pleasant.

"I'll be silent. Cast the genjutsu on Sasuke. There might be people in here anyway," Naruto said. "It's better if they think I'm alone."

They wandered up several series of stairs, with Naruto listening for sounds of movement or sleep, before they reached the top floor.

"We're not staying in here," Naruto explained. "We're looking for places that we can get to only from this apartment. Lots of the apartments around here are pretty much all rubble on the ground and second floor, but people usually put out fires and the like near the top floor quicker, because it means the building won't collapse and kill people. So it's likely that they're less damaged closer to the top."

Naruto wandered to the window and stared down a space in the building which Sakura could barely fit between, then climbed out, using his chakra to stick to the side of the apartment.

"Be silent," he whispered to the air. "Melt the frame of this window with a _small_ amount of fire - doesn't matter how slow it is - we don't want to make _any_ noise."

Sakura disabled the genjutsu and Naruto stuck his hand to the window. Sasuke took eight minutes to melt the window, and when he was done, Naruto experimentally pushed his hand through, pushing the entirety of the window and its frame into the darkened apartment. He set it down gently and then scoped it out.

"There's no one here," he said. The door was close and there weren't any holes in the walls. "We'll have to explore the rest of this apartment and choose a different one if anyone else lives here though."

He walked over to the window. "There's windows on this side because that's what the building permits say. They never said that the windows couldn't be facing brick walls." Naruto looked rather disgusted.

Sakura put herself and Sasuke back under the genjutsu and followed Naruto out as he opened the door and left it open just the slightest margin. Naruto plucked the hair clip, which Sakura thought she had left on the kitchen table in the apartment they vacated, out of his pocket and used to to pick the lock of the apartment next door.

It smelled rancid and for a moment, all three of them seemed to look sick. Naruto, whose mind told him that he was _alone_ due to the Genjutsu even if he knew otherwise, looked ready to cry. But then they realized that someone's refrigerator had been left open, and food which had been left rotted for years was probably out in the open.

"They left this place in a hurry. There's probably some money we can loot. Check the most obvious civilian places."

Naruto stuffed some napkins up his nose and pulled the seats off of the sofas.

Sasuke checked under the bed and Sakura ransacked the closets.

"There's a thousand ryo note that looks like it's been dropped, but nothing else," she said, having dropped the genjutsu.

"Check _in_ the mattress," Naruto said softly, but his voice carried. Sasuke grabbed a kitchen knife and slit the side of the mattress open.

"Nothing," he confirmed.

"Okay, let's hit the next apartment. We've got maybe ten or twelve more to go through, and I want to show you two the… _nightlife_ around here."

4

They found another twenty thousand ryo and a rather ancient looking tanto, but nothing else of note. Thankfully, there hadn't been any dead bodies. Naruto had collected every kitchen knife set that they had found, using his Earth Clones to ferry them back to the original apartment. While Naruto was no genius with kunai, it appeared as though he was _far_ better at throwing kitchen knives.

"We're on the fifth floor," he explained. "No one can hear us from the street, except between four in the morning and sunrise. If we want to spar or learn how to throw knives, this is a great place."

There were over a hundred knives of various quality and size. Sakura had claimed the tanto.

Naruto's Earth Clones had dragged two beds from other apartments into the living room, which was mostly bed without much room to walk at this point. It was almost a palace of poverty.

"The best thing we can do is hoard tons and tons of money, I guess. Then we'll have a treasure to take back to Konoha when we're done. If we can make thirty thousand ryo on our first day, we can make more tomorrow," Sakura said, strangely hopeful.

"And we have to infiltrate Gato Corporation," Sasuke said. "There's no other reason Itachi wouldn't tell us to escape the city. We'll meet the jonin contact in four months, and if Itachi never made it back… We'll burn Gato Corporation to the ground and make off with every single ryo we can carry." Sasuke threw a knife at the unlucky couch which had a human profile painted on it.

The knife buried itself in the painted profile's head.

Naruto nodded and wandered over to the window, craning his head out to see the position of the sun. "Okay, let's head out now. Don't… don't freak out," he said. Sakura and Sasuke exchanged glances once again.

"Leave the weapons behind," Sakura said. "You're jangling, Naruto."

Naruto acquiesced, withdrawing the rather large pair of kitchen knives from his pants pockets and leaving them on the table.

He gave a short hop and landed in the neighboring apartment.

"Genjutsu until both of you are out," Naruto whispered. After all, any bum could have wandered into this apartment - it could be accessed through a broken window.

Sakura held the Fade-Into-Nothing for several minutes before the streets were sufficiently crowded.

Sasuke let himself be led around, taking in the sights around him. Some large man was shouting at a scantily dressed woman on a street corner.

Naruto stared at the arguing man and woman darkly, then shook his head and looked away.

"Gato Corporation… if it runs a district, they probably sell drugs. It's not a big leap from selling drugs to selling people," Naruto said quietly. "Look for butterfly clips and follow those girls around. We'll meet back here in four hours. Stick _together_."

Naruto walked off down a particularly dim alleyway, leaving Sasuke and Sakura to their own devices yet again.

"What's he going to do?" Sakura asked, though she knew Sasuke didn't know.

Sasuke shrugged. "Naruto knows what's going on."

5

Naruto didn't need to pretend to be upset at what he was doing - his already existing emotions were very helpful in that regard. Sakura was the sneakiest one amongst them and Sasuke was the best actor, but Naruto was the best at twisting his emotions to suit the task at hand - whether it was manipulating the Hokage or manipulating the disgusting little man in front of him.

"You're looking for your sister, you say. And she has pink hair."

Naruto nodded, sniffling.

Takehiro-san was rather large in stature and he wore gaudy jewelry. His "office" was a little storage room in a ratty tea shop. The woman who had led Naruto into the building was clearly profiting off of whatever business that Takehiro engaged in.

Naruto was sure that this business was the trafficking of opium.

But it was probably more difficult to infiltrate the drug business. They may have expected adults, but children certainly could gain neither trust nor a job with Takehiro. Naruto was just making the gamble that Itachi-sensei was right - and Gato controlled all illegal business in this district.

"I have someone for you to talk to, young one. Midori, why don't you take little Naruto here to see Hamada-san?" A meaningful glance which no normal child could have possibly interpreted passed between them.

Midori led him through several cross streets to a seemingly well-kept warehouse and opened a door with a pair of keys.

The lock could be deadbolted on both the inside and outside. Naruto knew what this was.

As the woman was unlocking the door, Naruto's hands flashed into a bunch of seals, creating an Earth Clone. This time, _he_ was going to be a little late.

The woman deadbolted the door behind them.

"Midori-nee? Why did you lock us in here?"

Midori smiled, something disgusting to Naruto's eyes, in a way meant to calm children. "Do you know what a debt is, Naruto?"

"Yeah!" Naruto said, pretending to be eager. "It's when someone gives someone money, and the person promise to give back the money later."

Midori's smile widened. "Now, see, sometimes when someone does something for you, you owe them a debt for that as well. You have to do something for someone else."

Naruto nodded. "That sounds right," he said, sounding tentative - as though he didn't know where this conversation was going.

"You're going to have to do something for us, since we're helping you find your sister."

Naruto nodded enthusiastically, though he felt as though his insides had turned into stone.

6

"Kakashi. You are now entirely blind. Your hair will be dyed a coppery red."

Kakashi nodded. He had the chakra sense to not stumble into people, though attempting to walk in the street without guidance would be difficult.

Mikoto removed her shirt and Kakashi began to draw seals all over her.

"Your finger does not need to be on my nipple for this seal to be drawn."

She sounded amused, but Kakashi knew he was going to pay for it at some point. He didn't care much.

The seal burned red.

"Henge!" she cried out, as Kakashi pumped nearly all his chakra into the seal.

She slowly morphed into a ten year old girl with spinning red Sharingan eyes. Her trademark wazikashi looked a little to big for her.

There was _nobody_ better at infiltration than Uchiha Mikoto. Mikoto would easily lose in a fight against the collection of S-rank ninja her village produced - she had no insane power of Natural Chakra like the Sannin Jiraiya, no insane strength of the Sannin Tsunade, none of the immortal of Orochimaru, the speed of the Fourth, the jutsu library of the Third…

But when she pretended, nobody knew otherwise.

In thirty two years, from the moment she had graduated on the Fourth's genin team, she had never failed a mission.

Kakashi was intimidated. His partner had masks. Those masks had Halloween costumes. And the Halloween costumes had personalities.

And each personality belong to Mikoto of the Ten Thousand Faces was performed with a sort of perfection that spoke of a more quiet genius.

At the moment, Kakashi couldn't even be sure whether or not Mikoto truly cared about her son as much as she cared about not failing the mission.

It scared him, that this woman who could probably only hold him off for ten or fifteen minutes before succumbing on the battlefield could possibly neuter him in the guise of Maito Gai after their mission was over.

"You're regretting the overfamiliarity aren't you, Kakashi-kun." She smiled.

Kakashi shivered.

In the next minutes, as Mikoto got used to being the girl she was masquerading with, a little innocent shine had entered her eyes and her pouts became more and more natural.

"When I was five, I lived with grandpa and my older brother." She sniffed subtly.

_My god, this is amazing_, Kakashi thought.

"We weren't very well off, so every morning, my brother would go and chop wood for the stove. My brother wanted to be a woodcutter for our village. He wanted me to marry a boy I'd love. My grandpa … he passed away last year." She looked so genuinely sad that Kakashi wanted to hug her and tell her everything would be alright.

"So my brother decided that he wanted to go to the city and try to make it as a businessman one day. But then… he got the family disease… and he slowly went blind. So now… we don't know what to do," she ended in wail of anguish. "W-what if I go blind too? Who's going to take care of him? Who's going to take care of us?"

Mikoto slid onto his lap, perhaps one of the most uncomfortable feelings Kakashi had ever had and tapped his chest uncertainly in an imitation of actresses. "K-kakashi-sama. My brother doesn't know anything about this, but… I'm willing to do anything to make some money for his t-treatment."

She looked so hopeful, with just the right hint of fear - fear of the unknown, her mouth was turned up in the caricature of a smile and she looked as though she might scream and oh god Kakashi was _so_ uncomfortable.

Then she immediately climbed off.

"Good. Motherhood has not dulled my skill too much. I still need some work on my posture."

Kakashi had no advice for how she could make it more authentic.

"So… brother… try blindness out."

Kaskashi wrapped the bandages around his eyes and prepared for more criticism than he'd received in years.


	4. Chapter 4

Light My Way

Chapter 4

_Fuck him, I didn't wanna go to heaven anyway._

1

This was his choice. He was doing it for Konoha.

Naruto let Midori tear off his clothing and inspect him.

There was no other way. There was more ryo than he could imagine on the line.

Naruto watched her with trepidation he truly felt as she inspected him.

He might feel dirty now, but this wasn't quite very different from killing someone.

Midori pointed at clothing which he knew would fit far too tightly.

He was to kill Midori. It was written.

2

"The Boss has made it in. He won't be able to escape really easily. He has claimed you to be his sister."

Sakura nodded, unsure as to what _in_ was.

The clone seemed a lot more, well, down to earth than Naruto was. Perhaps it was aware of its mortality.

"Where?"

"I don't want to tell you."

"What are they going to do to you?" Sasuke asked at last. The majority of the knives were buried into that sofa which Naruto had painted for them. Not a single one touched. He was skillful.

"I don't want to tell you."

"Slavery?" Sasuke guessed.

The clone's jaw tightened.

Sakura started crying softly.

Sasuke grabbed the clone by its collar. "Will Naruto be safe?" The words were tainted with what Sakura believed to be indifference at first, but everything about Sasuke's posture screamed anger.

"He will not be damaged beyond repair."

"Yes he will," Sakura said.

The clone looked ready to contradict her, then nodded swiftly.

Sasuke buried a knife in the clone's chest. It wasn't quite as fast as Naruto, who would have knocked it out of the way. The clone dissolved into mud.

"We're going to find these people," Sasuke said, his tone of voice unchanging. "Then we're going to kill all of them. Before they really hurt Naruto." He suddenly smiled, and it glistened with hatred. It looked really wrong on him. "We're going to hurt them back, if they do."

Despite herself, Sakura nodded. Yes, she would kill in Naruto's name, if not her own.

Sasuke's vision burned so very red and everything became clear.

3

It was clear that Mikoto had practice moving in a younger form, as she easily kept pace with Kakashi. They had been traveling without pause for nearly forty hours, but neither of them showed signs of slowing down.

"I'm hungry," Kakashi finally decided, letting a hint of complaint leak into his tone.

"We will eat in Yeddo."

Kakashi shook his head. "We are fourteen hours from Yeddo."

"We will eat and sleep in Yeddo."

Kakashi groaned. He was far from entirely exhausted, but his sensei had always impressed the importance of sleeping and eating.

"Minato-sensei-"

"Was my teammate. We survived without food or reinforcements on two waterskins for five days in the deserts of Suna."

Was this the difference between an elite Shinobi and a legend?

"I won't be able to function at full capacity."

"Exactly."

Kakashi didn't break stride, but Mikoto clearly caught his expression of incredulity.

"You lack _discipline_, Kakashi-kouhai. You are a recently blind man in his early twenties. You should be starving. It is difficult to act starving if you aren't."

This was not the Uchiha Mikoto that was Itachi and Sasuke's mother. This… this was a sword of the Hokage, a ruthless sword which as easily cut down enemies as it clove its unskilled wielders in twain.

"You want me to starve."

Mikoto smiled at him, bright and terrible especially on the face of a girl of ten.

"Have you ever wanted for food or water, Kakashi-san?"

Kakashi shook his head. Even in his most celebrated missions, he had always been well fed, no matter what hospital bed he landed in.

"The Nidaime once said, 'Some shinobi are the leaves of a great and well grown tree. The others could only be the roots hidden in the darkness, which draw in the nutrition and water which the leaves would wither without.'"

Kakashi mulled the statement over in his mind. Clearly, they were not the ones being fed and watered in the dark. But it made sense in a strange way.

"There are some things which I have never done, Mikoto-san."

Mikoto smiled again. "I've done all of them, Kakashi-kun."

Kakashi was incredibly scared.

4

"I refuse. My resignation is effective immediately, Hokage-sama."

Danzo shook his head at the wayward teenager.

Could he kill both of them? Could he even kill one of them? Could he delay the inevitable?

What if he did kill the Hokage? What would that do for him or his clan? His mother had always said that the most dangerous enemy of a sword was its own swordsman after all and the Hokage held his ninja with a tight grip. Danzo held his own ninja till death tore them apart from one another.

If he fought the Hokage and Danzo now, they would kill him, field Ino-Shika-Cho and recall the Sannin.

None of them held any love for the Uchiha and their deaths would be beyond painful. If someone gave Senju Tsunade free reign to slaughter his clan, she would definitely come home. There were some hatchets which were too blunt to bury.

Itachi looked ready to scream.

"_Treason_. Be glad I have not struck you down where you stand, Uchiha Itachi." Itachi decided that he'd kill Danzo at some point in his life, even if it meant his death. He didn't like to kill often, but some men merited death simply by existing.

It was too late.

The suddenly, the Hokage's face took on an instance of contemplation. "You lied to me too."

Itachi shook his head in consternation, but the Hokage continued.

"You gave your genin team this mission to keep your younger brother out of the way."

Itachi looked truly alarmed. "I did nothing of that sort," he protested. Even if it were true, it sounded weak to his own ears.

The Hokage nodded. "In a situation so dire that I _had_ to send your mother to retrieve them. You play a dangerous game." His fingers twitched and for just a moment, Itachi thought the Sandaime was about to assault him, but in an instance his hands were still.

"Or perhaps you are as much a victim as you claim." The Hokage didn't look very contrite. His ninja were not victims, just sacrifices and larger sacrifices. At least that was how Itachi saw it.

The Hokage shook his head. "At the very least, be glad that your mother is gone. It would not be easy for you to kill her."

"Jiraiya's team was truly powerful, wasn't it?" Danzo's eyes had taken on a contemplative gleam.

"Yes, they were," came a voice from the window.

Itachi found panic now. There was no hope. As it stood, the man in the window could probably kill all three of them if he tried his best.

The Gallant Jiraiya was clumsily climbing through the Hokage's window. He landed in a wastepaper basket full of crumpled up sheets of paper, cursed and then rearranged the basket, refilling it with its spilled contents. Sarutobi watched him with bemused affection, Danzo with veiled hate.

"Surely you aren't planning to kill my very last student, were you, _sensei_?" Jiraiya's voice had taken on a sardonic edge as he threw out the last piece of paper.

Danzo glared at him and Jiraiya glared back. _Bad blood?_ Itachi wondered.

But perhaps Jiraiya was on his side more than the Hokage's.

"I'm very sorry, Sarutobi-sensei. But I will not allow you to kill my prettiest student."

He acted and spoke like a fool, but Itachi could tell that the man's mind was working every single angle of the scenario even as he pretended to be ignorant. If his mother had truly been part of the plot, Itachi was sure that her teacher would not allow her to betray Konoha. Jiraiya had killed his fair share of traitors over the years.

"But everyone else…" Jiraiya trailed off, then his eyes took on a hard glint. "You are planning to have little Itachi-kun here massacre the entirety of the Uchiha clan."

Mitokado and Utatane had been entirely silent during the entirety of the proceedings, sitting in the background. Neither of them were battle-capable anymore. They were non-entities, there because of the Hokage's gratitude. But they were easily as conniving as Danzo. Utatane had taken one genin team - with Konoha's White Fang. She had given him the tanto he had carried into battle and she had given him the wazikashi he had committed ritual suicide with.

So Itachi wasn't too surprised when she nodded mutely.

"There are civilians who run ice cream stores in the Uchiha clan district." Jiraiya's voice had turned mocking, angry. He was a reasonable man, if a very good ninja.

A little spark of hope ignited itself in Itachi's stomach despite himself.

"You chose a very strange time to come back to Konoha, Jiraiya."

The Sannin turned to Danzo and made a series of vulgar hand gestures with ANBU sign language.

"Jiraiya!" the Hokage protested. Mitokado looked equally affronted, but there was a strange smirk on Utatane's face.

"All of you, 'cept sensei, scram. Wait outside for me, Itachi."

Danzo stood up, knowing better than to butt heads with someone who could accidentally kill him, but he sneered in anger. Itachi wondered what it was like, to be like Jiraiya, to only care for people who could defend themselves infallibly. The Hokage, Senju Tsunade, the remnants of his students and colleagues…

Itachi walked outside after Danzo, who didn't even spare him a glance.

Moments later, the Hokage's teammates left the room, and the Hokage was left alone with Jiraiya.

"Let me get this straight, sensei. You granted no concessions whatsoever to the Uchiha, who lost just as many shinobi to the Kyuubi as every other clan in the village on the mere suspicion that someone had evolved a Mangekyo Sharingan and was controlling the beast at behest of the Clan Elders."

"I do not answer to you, Jiraiya. Never forget that it is _I_ who am your teacher. Both Fugaku and Mikoto were absent-"

Jiraiya stared at him with a look that questioned his sanity and the Hokage felt almost ashamed. "You're accusing one of _my_ students of treason?"

The Hokage pursed his lips.

Jiraiya shook his head. "Here me out, okay? I don't like the Uchiha much, myself. Fugaku certainly didn't deserve Mikoto-chan and he seriously believes that he has the power - politically and otherwise, to back up his claims of superiority. So when you do stupid things like having shouting matches with Hiashi, and letting Chouza and Inoichi retire and putting Shikaku behind a desk, he starts thinking that he's big shit."

The Hokage nodded. He'd correct Jiraiya after the boy was done. It was always easier that way.

"I saw this little bit of rebellion coming from five years away and I know you did too. A house divided cannot stand, sensei. How about you do me a favor? I'll go and assassinate the ten or fifteen people who are responsible as soon as possible and blame it on Kiri or something."

"We don't know who's responsible."

Jiraiya scoffed. "Certainly not Uchiha Tekka of Tekka Yakitori."

The Hokage looked ready to argue, but Jiraiya had already stalked out. Well, that certainly complicated matters.

"ANBU!" the Hokage called out. He raised his fingers in a trio of symbols that he hadn't used together in a while.

Boar, Deer, Butterfly. Ino, Shika, Cho.

A shiver ran down Ferret's spine.

5

There were two children to each bunk, and the bunks were pushed up right against one another. To be honest, it was kind of like some sort of deranged sleepover, Naruto thought.

Naruto was put in the same bed as a girl who was slightly older than him, who had a somewhat raspy singing voice and always half-hummed, half-mouthed the same song that she didn't quite remember. She said her mother taught it to her.

"I'm sorry… hmmm… You were the sun and moon to me… hmmmm… over me…"

Naruto didn't have the heart to complete the song for her. There were some things that were sacred, after all, and Naruto understood when and why certain things were sacred.

Most of the children already had learned why they were there. Those were the ones who were deathly afraid of Midori and everything the woman represented.

There were three or four others who were defiant like Naruto was - if only in secret. Naruto was, obviously, the only shinobi.

"Someone will come rescue us all one day," Naruto had promised. No one truly believed him, though most of the other children looked hopeful for just a moment.

So it was a little bit of a shock when the door was blown clean off its hinges and a very pissed off looking Sasuke stood on the other side.

Naruto had lost track of time, as there were no windows - just counts of seconds, minutes and hours. Perhaps three days had gone by, perhaps a week, definitely less than two weeks.

When a girl with pink hair darted in, most of the children thought that an angel had come to save them at last.

"How'd you get through the door, Sasuke?" Naruto asked nonchalantly, as though he expected the boy to show up at the very moment he did.

"I stole black powder from the Lunar New Year celebrations."

Naruto threw his fingers to his lips and hid several steps in the shadows near the door as a very confused and angry Midori stormed into the room.

Sasuke smirked at her, and Naruto flew out of the darkness.

In what could only be called a beautiful angle, Naruto sailed through the air and buried two fingers into the soft of her head, killing her instantly.

"Justice!" Naruto crowed, but only Sasuke crowed alongside him. Even Sakura looked a little scared.

"Everybody, get out. Never speak of this. Run," Naruto said, his mood darkening.

Sakura and Sasuke grabbed him by the hand and the trio scaled a wall, ran along the inside of an alleyway until they reached a now-familiar building.

The three of them leapt into the broken window, ran up the stairs, then flipped themselves into the apartment which they had colonized a while ago.

"I wasn't going to let you hurt yourself like that," Sakura said. "I know what they do in places like that."

"You jeopardized the mission," Naruto said. "Now they know there are bigger people after them."

Sakura glared. "They won't expect us. We're too young. They'll think the adults did it."

"You should have stabbed her," Sasuke said, analyzing the situation. "That would have killed her just as easy…"

Naruto grunted and shook his head.

They didn't ask what the woman had done to deserve whatever it was, but it was clear that Naruto wasn't going to budge on this one. Neither Sasuke nor Sakura commented on Naruto's clothing.

6

Mikoto and Kakashi arrived to Yeddo during the start of Lunar New Year season, and a district in complete panic. First, someone had apparently blown up a lucrative motel in the area, and then someone had murdered a woman in a warehouse. The warehouse's door had been destroyed by black powder and the woman had been murdered most gruesomely.

The nosy middle-aged woman who looked as though she pitied Kakashi for his blindness told the story of how the upstanding Midori-san of Midori Teas had been killed while visiting a warehouse - but get this! She held none of her products in the warehouse. None of her bosses had anything to do with the warehouse. And there were tiny beds in rows in rows in there which looked lived in.

No one was sure what Midori-san had been up to, but she had been killed most gruesomely, so she must have discovered something that no one wanted her to see, right?

Mikoto knew better. Gruesome kills were the mark of angry shinobi, whether old or young.

"Did you hear about that chunin lady? Hiroko?" Kakashi asked her, as they slowly moved through the crowds.

Mikoto shook her head in the negative.

"So Naruto found her in some sort of abandoned apartment. And there's a ton around here. I think Team Seven will have found and squatted in some abandoned-"

Kakashi tripped over the uneven sidewalk and Mikoto let out a gasp in the most perfect imitation of panic as he crashed to the ground. The people around them watched him sympathetically as he struggled to his feet.

Mikoto sat down next to him as he made a show of giving up and began crying softly.

"Here, big brother, let me- let me help you up," she said, as he pulled himself to his feet with her help. Kakashi's knees ached from the fall and he limped away, his hand in hers.

Her mouth ghosted near his ears. "Let's go catalogue all the abandoned buildings that are rather difficult to get into."

Kakashi nodded. This entire venture, in the words of the Jonin commander, was quite troublesome.

7

Jiraiya of the Sannin and Uchiha Itachi stood across from one another in the clearing.

"Elite Jonin, you skillset consists of high powered fire ninjutsu, an arsenal of genjutsu within the top percentage of Konoha's forces, taijutsu which would allow you to survive for more than long enough to utilize these skills to the fullest, and general ability with the blade."

Itachi nodded.

Suddenly, Jiraiya was in his guard, and he was blocking.

The sound of fabric rustling through the wind was especially loud when the Toad Sage fought and dramatic, if slightly comical, _whups_ of his arms moving could be heard.

But the taijutsu was extremely effective. He blocked four overhead hits which would have broken through his guard were he not moving backwards, a pair of extremely quick sweeps, and then a sucker punch shattered his guard - nearly shattering his arms, and he flew back several feet, landing heavily on his heels.

The man surged forward, ducking over his desperate retaliatory high kick and a palm strike which would have stopped his heart, had Jiraiya hit as hard as he could have, slapped him in the chest and immediately drove his back into the mud.

Itachi bounded up, but Jiraiya was already ten paces from him.

"Adequate."

Somehow, that as satisfying as any praise his instructors had ever given him.

"Doton: Retsudo Tensho!" Jiraiya's fingers twisted into a trio of seals and then slammed it into the ground, and a veritable whirlpool surged through the ground towards Itachi.

Itachi gave a panicked jump, but Jiraiya wasn't done. "Doton: Dosekiryu!" The earth grew into a huge dragon and surged out of the whirlpool, charging the boy down.

Itachi analyzed Jiraiya's strategy in the split second when his Sharingan activated. The whirling Earth had left him disoriented and in the air, while the Earth Dragon had been made easy to manipulate through the already churned up ground.

If Jiraiya had wanted to kill him, using the A-ranked Earth Dragon Bullet rather than the B-ranked Earth Dragon would probably have damaged him severely. But the man was just testing him to see how he reacted to situations like this.

"Katon: Karyuu Endan!" Itachi shouted, using his own Fire Dragon to both push himself backwards through the air and respond to the Earth Dragon.

The blaze charred the Earth Dragon into nothing and his own flames dissipated.

"Katon: Hosenka no Jutsu," Itachi mouthed, as he breathed out a collection of small fireballs at Jiraiya to buy time for himself.

_Oh that's just unfair_, he thought, as Jiraiya ran through some unspecified hand seals and globs of earth jumped up out of the still spinning whirlpool to swallow the fire whole, snuffing them out instantly.

The globs of earth changed direction and surged through the air at him. Itachi ducked behind a tree and watched, astonished, as the globs tore through lines of trees as if they were made of paper.

Jiraiya shouted over the battlefield. "Using fire techniques against a proficient earth user is extremely dangerous. I may not have transformed any of the mud into stone - as it takes a lot of chakra, but your Phoenix Flame technique pretty much baked them for me and made them clay."

Itachi realized that Jiraiya of the Sannin was teaching him. Assaulting him, yes, but teaching him all the same.

He returned fire with everything he had.

8

"Coast is clear," Sasuke mumbled. The three of them quickly hopped out of the broken window.

The other night, they had come to the realization that either Gato or whoever was in charge of the operation in Yeddo had hired ninja. The ninja were loud, proud and had scratched out forehead protectors.

Missing-nin. But not just any missing-nin. They were missing-nin from Iwakagure.

"They'll probably kill us instantly if they figure out we're from Konoha," Sasuke grumbled, as they sat on the ground with children's toys - marbles, and observed the ninja talking to a woman in the park.

"It'll be a long chase. We all know the Shunshin. If we get discovered, we might as well run back to Konoha." Sakura was ever the voice of reason, as much as Sasuke was the voice of caution.

Naruto was the voice of determination. "We're not going to be discovered. And we're going to take them down and steal all their money. It's dirty money anyway." His face darkened. In a fit of loyalty, Sasuke and Sakura's faces darkened as well.

They continued to play marbles until the ninja left and the woman wandered away as well.

"This park is a real dump," Naruto complained. There was trash everywhere. Most of the children playing had little or no clothing on. He had never seen Sasuke so absolutely filthy before. Sakura's hair was matted and uncleaned. The less said about how the three of them smelled, the better.

"I miss Konoha," Sakura whispered earnestly. Naruto and Sasuke did too.

They walked off into a larger alleyway, where there were men and women selling cured meats. Naruto fished out a five hundred ryo coin and bought the three of them a very large bag of smoked pork rinds.

"I think one thing I'll miss about this place is how gross and yummy the food is at the same time," Sasuke whispered to each of his companions as he chewed on a pork rind. Sakura looked at the piece in her hand, which was dripping grease into her palm, then put it in her mouth and started to chew on it. She had another one. Then another one. Then another handful.

"We'll come back to visit one day. There are places kind of like this in Konoha, too," Naruto said.

"When we get back, you're taking us home with you and around the city, to explore," Sasuke said, almost frantically.

Sakura nodded emphatically. The three of them knew that Naruto didn't like to confront the more angry and virulent parts of his life, but they were ready to do it with him.

9

They both knew that the man who had come calling was here for one thing and one thing only, but the florist still played out the farce.

"Welcome to Yamanaka Flowers! Would you be interested in some bluebells? They're in season right now - perfect for declaring gratitude to a good friend.

"Yamanaka Inoichi. The Hokage summons you."

Inoichi's chakra strings, which were invisible to most ninja, even his former subordinates in ANBU, summoned a cloud of tulips and he presented them to the woman, stems up.

"Do you know what upside-down tulips mean?" Inoichi asked, his voice gently chastising.

"You may not reject the Hokage, Yamanaka-sempai."

Inoichi snorted. "Do you want to fight about it?"

Ferret took a step back, involuntarily.

"Daddy? What's going on?" Yamanaka Ino stepped out of the back room.

"Nothing, dear. The nice ninja was just leaving. I'll see her out."

Inoichi stood up.

"Daddy?"

Inoichi turned around to Ino.

"Why do you have your sword with you?"

Inoichi's smile was charming to his daughter and deadly to Ferret. "Because it makes sure that ninjas stay nice, princess."

"Can I have a sword too?"

Inoichi nodded absentmindedly, then walked out behind Ferret.

"You have ten seconds to explain to me why my eight year old daughter had to see that," Inoichi whispered.

Inoichi realized that Ferret was shaking in fear, and toned it down a notch. He _had_ been the Leaf's star interrogator for too many years. It came with a reputation.

"H-hokage-sama recalled Ino-Shika-Cho," Ferret said.

"You came to me last."

Ferret nodded. Inoichi chuckled and disappeared in a sealless Shunshin no Jutsu.

10

"Shikaku," Chouza boomed, bumping fists with the other man. He turned around. "Inoichi!" he cried out. "Why do you think they recalled us?"

Inoichi shrugged. "Ferret-san wouldn't tell me anything."

Chouza laughed. "I haven't heard anyone refuse _you_ information before." Shikaku chuckled as well.

While the three of them still ate dinner together once or twice a week, they never disliked having excuses to see one another.

They slowly ascended the stairs up to the Hokage's office. Before they walked in, Inoichi twisted his hands into a rather uncommon seal.

"May sensei rest well."

Shikaku and Chouza repeated it after him. It was ritualistic, yes, but they did still feel some measure of affection for their teacher after all these thirty years.

"Hokage-sama!" Jonin Commander Nara Shikaku called out, knocking. "Team Ino-Shika-Cho reporting for duty."

"Come in," came the response.

Chouza pushed the door open and the three of them took seats across from the Hokage.

"Your mission leader is Jiraiya."

Straight to the mission. This was important. Usually the Hokage had some kind words when he recalled them every blue moon or so.

The three of them let their attention be drawn to the man standing next to the Hokage's desk.

"Jiraiya-sama," they greeted in unison.

"The better shinobi of this village," Jiraiya greeted in return, truly meaning it. "We have a little bit of any issue."

Shikaku suddenly narrowed his eyes. "You're a shadow clone."

Jiraiya nodded. "The real me is currently speaking with Uchiha Itachi."

Jiraiya was certain the men could communicate with their minds, because they all looked to one another and assumed the same expression - caution.

"There are traitors from within the Uchiha clan."

Inoichi's head tilted to the right and he gave Jiraiya a baleful look. "I could have told you that, and I've been a florist for a decade."

Chouza shrugged, clearly uncomfortable. Shikaku said and did nothing.

"We have thirty-seven heads to collect," Jiraiya said.

Inoichi grunted. This was nasty business, but they were very good at it.


	5. Chapter 5

Light My Way

Chapter 5

_You knew I had the cure, you knew you went astray._

1

Kakashi was well adjusted by the time Mikoto was back from her scouting mission. He seemed to be comfortable enough to be reading his copy of Icha Icha again. And any sort of disorientation he had received from not eating for several days seemed to have disappeared.

"You know, Minato might have been right about your need to eat," Mikoto said, lightly biting.

Kakashi shrugged as he stuffed another handful of pork rinds under his mask.

"These are delicious," he said, pointing to a veritable mountain of pork rinds on a tray. "Stole 'em with an invisibility jutsu."

"Kakashi!" Mikoto said, lightly chastising. "These people are poor enough as is."

"Bet Naruto's stealing from them," he said, somewhat unrepentant.

They were staying at the top floor of an apartment that they had entered through a broken window. This was one of the five most likely choices of places to stay, based on the areas they had scouted. They had been here for nearly twenty hours, but Kakashi had figured that spending two days at each location would probably guarantee them the ability to ferret the cute little genin out.

"I hear voices," they both said at the same time.

"We should run down there," Kakashi said, pushing the plate of pork rinds away from himself.

Mikoto shook her head. "We should make a lot of noise. If someone comes to look for us, it'll be easier to hide their bodies up here than down there."

Kakashi couldn't argue with that logic. After all, his own assassinations were usually performed with explosions, lightning and lots of extremely fast running. No one ever saw him, even if they suspected him and raised his bounty for it.

He grimaced. He did have a perfect record for assassinations, though. But this was a retrieval mission, first.

"Onee-san!" Mikoto squealed on the top of her lungs.

The shuffling noise downstairs decreased in volume.

The footsteps headed upwards, cautiously. Almost like ninja.

Mikoto opened the door and Kakashi lay down with his back against the door, feigning sleep. His copy of Icha Icha and his mask had been slipped under the couch he was on. He gave an expert kick to his plate of pork rinds and they sailed through the air, sliding from one edge of the kitchen countertop to the side of the stove. Not a single pork rind was spilled.

"That's a skill," Mikoto whispered, probably finding it funny. Kakashi smirked against the back of the couch. He hadn't even had to practice that one.

When a pink haired girl matching the description for Haruno Sakura leapt through the door and landed next to Kakashi with a knife, flanked by Uzumaki Naruto, a palpable surge of relief went through Mikoto.

She fell forward in her chair and it rose up to meet the chin of the boy sneaking up on her.

"Now, now, Sasuke-kun. It's not polite to draw a knife on your mommy," she said, turning around.

Kakashi neutralized Sakura and Naruto with quick taps to their wrists, causing them to drop their own knives.

Sasuke had landed on his rump and was now staring up at her.

His eyes traced over her features, deciding that this girl was definitely from his family.

"You are not my mother. Konoha is two months early," he said. His face darkened. "If you're really from Konoha."

Naruto took this opportunity to throw his hand against Kakashi's throat, but the man checked his palm with a wagging chin and sent Naruto sprawling as well, somehow.

Sakura jumped back, pulling out a thin knife that was remarkably well concealed.

"Uchiha Sasuke. Stand down. I am Elite Jonin Hatake Kakashi. That is Elite Jonin Uchiha Mikoto under the effects of an age repression seal."

The military-styled speech was clearly comfortable to the younger boy, who relaxed a little bit after the information about the seal.

Naruto groaned. "We can't stop them anyway. I told you we should have ran. Besides, if they weren't friendlies, we would be missing arms and legs now."

Only Sakura didn't seem convinced. "When and where was out rendezvous point supposed to be. Who is our jonin sensei?"

Mikoto smiled at her. "My foolish little son blew up a hotel, then left you in our capital city to wait four months to date and rendezvous within a two block radius of the hotel, in one of the three alleyways. The test would be a Konoha battle chant in sign."

Her hands twisted through a series of words. _Hold out your hands and call the fire, reach for the beyond to protect what's there. Tonight's dancing leaves come out to bear, on the name of my forefathers I do so swear._

"How do I know you didn't just pick that up somewhere?" Sakura said. Sakura decided to sign back, with more exotic words. _Konoha was founded by Senju, two, with control over earth green and water blue. Sitting between two doors, entering society with bliss-bringing hands. Uchiha, Hyuuga, Aburame rang true, growing clans from wandering bands._

Mikoto's smile widened. This girl knew how to play the old game of handsign history. _The Sandaime was a man of world renown, God of Shinobi all around. Libraries and libraries read and burnt, three thousand techniques to master, three thousand learnt._

"Hey, I taught you that," Naruto complained. He was having a good time watching and interpreting the handsigns though, and was totally into the idea of playing this game for hours and hours. His own hands responded quick. _The Yondaime had hair and heart burning gold, to neither demons of Earth nor Fox-Fire would he fold. Spiraling spheres, yellow flashes and bosses of Toads, for the longest would his history be told._

Mikoto stared at his hands carefully. That was not the usual history of the Yondaime which they signed going into battle. But then again, Naruto had the right to tell any story he wanted.

By now, Kakashi had caught on. "Maa," he muttered, his verbal tick showing, "this is a fantastic way for Konoha shinobi to verify their identity." He signed in response. _The Fourth was a teacher most dear, who taught his students without a hint of fear. He had a love for shinobi and civilians both and gave his life to honor his oath._

"You're one of the Yondaime's students?" Naruto said, with no volume control. Sakura and Sasuke immediately shushed him.

"Okay, okay," Sasuke grunted. "We get it, we all get it. Let's go home now."

Naruto pouted. He was just getting _started_.

Soon enough, Kakashi and Mikoto had organized their plan of action. They were to escape Yeddo by the dark of the night and it was barely evening at the moment. Naruto and Sasuke had been supervised by Kakashi in cleaning out the apartment the trio of Team Seven had lived in for two months.

Kakashi stared at a couch with a target and far too many holes morbidly. "I pity the armchair," he said.

Sasuke scowled. "Do you always like to pretend you're not a ninja or something?"

Kakashi smiled at him, his eyes crinkling. "It's fun to pretend that you aren't soaked in the blood of your enemies!"

"Gross," Naruto muttered under his breath.

"What was that? I seem to have developed a bit of hearing loss in my advanced age," Kakashi called over to the blond boy, who was cleaning out and selectively eating stuff in the fridge.

"Save me a pear," Sakura shouted.

"Already done," Sasuke shouted back to the girl in the other room.

Kakashi grinned at the level of comfort the team showed with one another. They even knew what type of food to save each other! It warmed his heart.

Naruto started to throw tomatoes at Sasuke, who was catching them the best he could without damaging them.

"I like these," Sasuke said, indignant. "I'm going to put smushed tomato in all of your ramen."

"That's not very nice, Sasuke-kun. Don't do things like that to your friends," said a very familiar voice.

Sasuke swallowed. It really had been his mother under an age seal of some sort.

Naruto's face lit up in a smile. "Pretty Uchiha lady!" he shouted.

"Naruto," Sasuke warned. "That's my mother."

Naruto giggled and scratched the back of his head in a way that Kakashi thought was very similar to his own.

They sat around for an almost-family dinner of ramen and pork rinds as the rays of sunlight finally disappeared, where Naruto proved he could eat as much as everyone else at the table combined. Sasuke ate a tomato for every bowl of ramen that Naruto consumed and Kakashi continued to shovel pork rinds under his mask while reading.

"Boys," Sakura said, scowling as the three stared down one another. Mikoto smiled at her. They were both slowly eating their first bowls of ramen and their first tomatoes.

2

"There are Iwa missing nin tailing us," Kakashi signed discretely.

"How do you think they figured it out?" Mikoto signed back.

"One of our genin must have been seen. Two of them have rather unmistakable hair, after all. Or it might even have been either of us," Kakashi signed.

Mikoto rolled her eyes.

"You're right. I don't make mistakes," Kakashi signed.

Mikoto smiled at him. "Are we blooding them?"

"Maybe a bit too young?" Kakashi looked uncertain.

"Your age. My age."

Kakashi understood.

"Naruto," Kakashi whispered. "The three of you should kill the missing nin tailing us. They're around two leagues behind us, but they're catching up fast. We'll bail you out if you fail."

"No worries, Hatake-san," Sakura, of all people, said. "We'll get it done. Naruto's done his share this mission."

Kakashi nodded and they all stopped in a clearing.

Sasuke began to hum and set up traps with the veritable bundle of knives that he had carried back.

"Can you be a distraction, Naruto?" Sakura asked seriously.

Naruto nodded mutely, clearly uncomfortable.

"Hey, Naruto," Sasuke said quietly. "If you don't want to do it, me and Sakura can-"

Naruto shook his head frantically. "I can do it. _Tsuchi Bunshin no Jutsu_," he mouthed. His clones furthered transformed into copies of everyone in the team.

They looked to be setting up camp.

"Won't work," Mikoto said. "One of them is definitely a sensor type."

Naruto scowled. "I can give them more or less chakra," he countered.

"Your funeral," Sakura said cheerfully. Mikoto did look rather impressed when he reformed his clones, though.

"Better than _your_ funeral," Naruto said darkly.

"No it's not."

Sasuke chose not to comment, though Kakashi decided that the boy looked a combination of exasperated and worried. No team could have no conflict whatsoever, the man guessed.

They were perched in trees, concealing their chakra when one of the Iwa missing nin, who could have been no older than fifteen years old rushed into the clearing, screaming.

"You killed my father, Hatake Kakashi!"

The actual Hatake Kakashi was actually in the process of break the missing nin's jonin sensei's jaw with one hand as Mikoto was handing him a kitchen knife to bury into the back of the man's head.

The clone captured his mannerisms rather well, parrying the boy's drawn kunai with the small kitchen knife he held - straight into the fire.

For the record, the boy managed to keep himself from getting burned by flipping rather quickly, using his own momentum to influence the directional trajectory.

He rolled over a trip wire and a large amount of knives rained on him from the treetops as the clones jumped into the shadows.

"Ryuichi!" someone shouted. "Doton: Doryuheki!"

A wall of earth rose up to meet the knives, catching most of them. One of them managed to bury itself into Ryuichi's stomach. Kakashi raised an eyebrow over the cover of his book. It must have been painful.

"No!" the girl who had summoned the earth wall shouted.

"Get him to safety, I'll kill all of them," another voice promised, as they cautiously ran into the clearing, managing to keep away from the various traps.

"No," the girl said. "Fuck this job. That's Hatake Kakashi. Ryuichi's going to die without medical treatment. Our lives over a bit of money. We're not strong enough to fight the good fight yet."

"Let them go," Sasuke signed.

Sakura nodded and Naruto agreed. It appeared that his clones weren't going to kill them either.

And then, suddenly Mikoto was in the clearing, a trickle of chakra trailing out of her fingers. The pair fell to the ground as if their strings had been cut.

"What-" Sasuke said outloud as Kakashi flashed out of their hiding spot in a sealless Shunshin and decapitated both the girl and the other boy in one circular motion.

A casual foot brought all of Kakashi's weight on Ryuichi's neck.

"Oh my god," Sakura whispered.

Mikoto's lips thinned imperceptibly.

"Needless?" Kakashi wondered aloud at her. "Of course not!" He smiled magnanimously. "Sometimes…" he trailed off, before his smile widened from behind his mask. "You have to go above and beyond the call of duty!"

One of Naruto's earth clone dispelled over the campfire. The other four began digging pits to bury the bodies. The five of them continued back to Konoha in silence, with the exception of Kakashi who was whistling the theme song to some Saturday morning kid's cartoon.

3

If Mikoto didn't know something was wrong when she stepped into the Hokage's office, she found out rather quickly as her old jonin sensei put her through the window with a heavy hand.

She let her elbows break the glass behind her and bent her head forward as to not allow it to hit the frame as she plunged out onto the rooftop of a tea shop. She landed gracefully.

"Miki-chan. Training Ground Eight. Now," said a rather old, if unimpressively sized, toad next to her.

She knew what this was about and while she was a good enough ninja to show none of her fear, she was shaking inside.

This meant that Jiraiya had found out about The Plot. There was no doubt about it.

Jiraiya didn't take his students to the vast expanse of dirt and sand on Training Ground Eight unless he wanted to punish them.

Of course, her teammates had been the target of his ire more often than she was. He did always have a soft spot for her, even more so than Minato.

She ghosted over the tiles of the various rooftops and weighed her options.

She could go and attempt to convince her teacher not to kill her. There was a somewhat okay chance of that, Jiraiya was reasonable and would listen to her, at the very least.

She could run away, now, and assume a different form for the rest of her life and slowly grow to old age. As long as she didn't make any contact with anyone she had ever known, ever and hid herself in a village of Snow Country - where Jiraiya had the third least amount of contacts, she could do it.

But if he were to raise his hand to her, he would expect her to run. She doubted she could outrun him, at least without surprise and preparation.

She could try to kill him. But her chances of success were about as close to zero as getting away from this scenario scot-free.

Before long, she was standing behind Jiraiya on a rocky outcrop of Training Ground Eight.

She decided to put her pride away and knelt.

Jiraiya, who still had not turned to face her, scoffed. "I'm surprised. I thought you'd run. You could have hid somewhere in Snow or Grass, y'know. Would have taken me fifteen, twenty years to find you and by that point you could have moved on to other places, taking new disguises. You wouldn't get to see any family ever again, but some people would pay that price to survive."

"I would not disrespect you like that, Jiraiya-sensei."

Jiraiya scoffed again and slowly rotated to look her in the eyes. "I'm surprised you'd admit to respecting me, ever. You were always the proudest of my three."

Despite herself, Mikoto protested. "I was _not_ as proud as Minato!" Jiraiya liked it when she was being authentic.

"I was top kunoichi!" Jiraiya mocked, his pitch frightening similar to hers. There was no warmth in his voice - it was clear that he was being funny because he didn't want to do this, he didn't want to deal with this scenario.

They looked at each other for a minute.

Mikoto took a gamble. "You should kill me, sensei. Tsukuyomi knows I deserve it."

"Aye, he does."

She winced internally.

"I don't think I will though," Jiraiya said heavily. "I don't think I could kill you if you weren't fighting back. I can certainly drag you into the cells and have you tortured. Or worse, confined indefinitely with no human contact. Or starved, even."

He looked at her sharply.

Mikoto knew better than to wave her masks around. Jiraiya had taught her how to hide herself as much as she had tried to perfect it, so she let herself frown.

Mikoto felt the blow before it hit her - Jiraiya was fast enough so that if she were some just-passed jonin, the very air he displaced with a blow could send her careening. But she wasn't, so she waited for his fist to find her face.

He stopped an inch away from her eye. She hadn't seen him move the rest of his body, but that was the deception of Gama no Ken, his almighty Toad Fist. The Three Sannin, each had developed a way to deceive Dojutsu, whether or not they were foreign strains. Orochimaru had pieced together the Dance of the Standing Snake with the bodies of defected Hyuuga and Uchiha - or perhaps innocent ones. Tsunade had created the Slug's Grapple using old tricks in Senju scrolls. Her own teacher had revamped Toad Style with a little bit of imagination alone.

They were rather effective, especially if her eyes weren't even on. She had taken special care not to activate them by instinct, as most Uchiha were prone to do under high stress situations.

Even so, the Sharingan in her left eye activated as she channeled chakra to it to ensure that Jiraiya's fist didn't burst the blood vessels in in despite the lack of contact.

"What am I going to do with you, Miki-chan?" Jiraiya whispered as her Sharingan faded away and his hand dropped to his side slowly. She was still kneeling and he was still sitting.

"You can seal my Chakra. Add gravity seals onto me so I move like a civilian."

Jiraiya shook his head. "That would be a gift, not a punishment. You've retired for good, what is it, three times already? Nice try though," he said, a hint of his old playfulness in his tone.

They stared at one another for a moment. Jiraiya looked disappointed. Mikoto looked contrite.

"Why don't you go report to the Hokage, first. I'll figure out what your punishment is. I told Kakashi to take the kids out to lunch anyway."

Mikoto turned to leave.

"Hey, don't cry. You know I don't want to hurt you."

But it was a little late for that.

4

It was fairly obvious to Mikoto that she was not in the Hokage's good graces, but that didn't stop her from being angry about Kakashi's explanation of why it was necessary to kill the three Iwa missing nin genin.

"So one of them had a real grudge against me. They were all approaching cautiously, when he dashed forwards and told Naruto's clone that I had killed his father. So I killed their jonin-sensei, who probably convinced them to go missing-nin. And then I killed the three genin because Team Seven couldn't."

Sarutobi nodded. "Yes, I do believe they're a bit too young to be killing children just a tad older than them in peacetime."

Mikoto was furious, even if she kept her smile straight and narrow. Hatake Kakashi was getting away with killing kids that they could have brought back to Konoha and reformed. Or let go, even. They were hardly any danger without their jonin sensei.

"Kakashi," the Hokage reprimanded without a hint of fire. "You could have brought them back. They could have been reformed. They did leave that hellhole after all, didn't they?"

Kakashi shook his head. "Couldn't take the chance. The genin were in danger. Naruto could have been in danger."

Sarutobi nodded gravely. "You did well, Kakashi."

Mikoto didn't agree, but she really wasn't in any position to file a complaint.


End file.
